Upgrade - 31: MacBook Review Special

Episode Date: April 9, 2015

On this special episode Jason is quizzed by Myke and the listeners about his review of the new MacBook.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 31 today's show is brought to you by igloo and smile with pdf pen scan plus this is an extra special episode today we have a second episode in the week you guys thought that we wouldn't be back until next week until you had me, but here I am. I'm back from my holiday and talking to Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. Welcome back. It was very funny when I was listening to last week's episode

and you were like, oh, Mike, we'll be back next week. And I'm like, little do they know. At the end of the... And that wasn't last week's episode. That was this week's episode. We just have another one. At the end, I said, we'll be back next week. And then I said, we'll see you soon. That was foreshadowing because I didn't want to say we'll see you next week because I knew we would actually be back before then.

And so here we are. Here we are. Here we are. So the reason we're doing this today is because uh today the review embargo lifted for the new macbook the new 12-inch macbook um and you have one of them and you've been you've been testing out for a couple of weeks and you're happy to say that you like it it's not a couple of weeks i actually got so i got home from my my very long european uh journey on uh friday and saturday morning i got it so i've only had it i've only had So I've only had it less than a week.

Less than a week. I could have probably gotten it, I think the previous Tuesday was when they were going to ship them out, and I told them that I was in Ireland and that they should, they said we'll just ship it to have it arrive when you get home. So that's what they did. So how many days have you actually had it in your person? This is day six.

So five days covering the writing of the review that I had it. Right. And how long? So you would have had it for like maybe another four or five? Yeah, I would have had it for another four. Yeah, because the embargo was a Thursday and they were going to ship it out on Tuesday. So, you know, really I would have had it for an extra, yeah, extra three or four days.

Okay. But I was having too much fun in Ireland, so that didn't happen. I asked them if they could send it to Ireland and they said no. So it's fine. Fair enough. It's worth a go. Yeah. So I have two very quick pieces of follow-up on last week's episode.

You mean this week's episode? Oh, the last episode. Yes. Episode 30. I don't know where I amup on last week's episode. You mean this week's episode? Oh, the last episode. Yes. Episode 30. I don't know where I am. The Syracuse episode. Yeah, I got home a couple of hours ago. I'm kind of all over the place.

I don't know what day of the week it is. I haven't known what day of the week it is for two weeks. It feels like Monday, though, doesn't it? Because we're talking. It feels like Monday now. And also, I just recorded with Casey, so I don't know where I am. I'm recording Connected later. I don't know what's going on.

I know what that's like. That was my weekend. Very confusing. I had no idea when I was recording with Casey. So I have two sentences. That's all I have. One, I thought that the ad reads were great and you did a good job because you said you thought they were bad and I thought they were very good. It was just weird.

You were in charge of this show. This is the one podcast I do that I'm not in charge of, and I had to be in charge of it. It was very strange. And the other thing is, I would like to issue an open challenge to John Syracuse to pull my beard at WWDC. To prove that you're the real Mike,

and not the clone? The twin Mike. I was on a plane doing that thing where you're shaking of laughter and people think you're crazy. I know that thing. That was what was happening to me. Nice. So yeah, really great episode. It was nice to hear you two talking together.

And I'm very excited for Robot or Not. We're laying the foundations. I'm way more excited than John is, I think, about that. We all are. But he's warming up to it. So we'll do some Robot or Not. He was being very, very protective. Yeah.

He wouldn't let you steal it. I think that was telling that he thought I was going to ruin it by talking about it too far in advance. So that's good. Yeah, that was good. I should say we also got a lot of follow-up from people. We were talking about how when one of my complaints about one section of the Becoming Steve Jobs book is they talk about the iPhone being a – the first iPhone being a disappointment because it didn't run apps, which fits into their whole narrative about how the App Store was this wonderful thing, which it was.

But, you know, I thought people really loved the iPhone and were obsessed with the iPhone. It was a huge talking point. Everybody was talking about they wanted one and could they get one. And I remember that from the time. And it doesn't really fit with their idea that, oh, it doesn't have third-party apps, so we're not excited about it. I think that's a bogus claim. And we said during that like because they said it doesn't run powerful spreadsheets and john and i were both laughing

about like who wanted powerful spreadsheets on their phones back then and we heard from everybody who was using windows mobile at the time that had like a mobile version of excel saying well actually i was running powerful spreadsheets on my phone, which if we said no phones ran spreadsheets in 2007, I will apologize for that. But I think you're missing the point. The point is I think regular people did not think of the iPhone and think that is a device that I would like to run a powerful spreadsheet on or indeed really third-party apps. I think the iPhone was quite a phenomenon in the first generation before the App Store came out. That was what we were saying. I think that the book is wrong in saying that it was a disappointment. It was a disappointment to

super tech nerds and to developers that they couldn't develop for it right out of the box. But I remember everybody I knew asking me about the iPhone when it was coming out. People were really excited about it. And so to say that the iPhone's first, like the iPod, because it didn't run on PCs, the first generation, although we all thought it was pretty amazing, it was not in the public consciousness. The iPhone was in the public consciousness from the beginning. And if your book claims that it was kind of a swing and a miss and it wasn't until the app store that the iPhone caught fire, I think your book is wrong. Yeah, I got to that part today. Like, I've just gotten to that bit in the book.

And I was sitting on the plane listening to it. I'm like, what are you talking about? I know. Like, where did this information come from? Well, and you've been doing with behind the app. I mean, there's enthusiasm that developers had for it. There's no doubt. And there were several people, I remember in the days afterward, I was on a podcast with John Gruber and Merlin Mann, where we basically said there's going to be an app store in a year.

We were already talking about it. It's like it'll be next year and it'll be curated. And that's exactly what happened. Where these guys, yeah, like I said, like they're the problem i have with the book because i i don't dislike the book like john disliked the first 10 of the book let's keep that in mind uh i i don't feel as negatively about it but i do have at several points i see this narrative they're trying to build, and I say, no, that's not real. That didn't actually happen. And that doesn't make me super enthusiastic about the other parts of the book that I don't know the facts of, because I have to take them at their word. And I get that they're trying to tell a certain kind of story, but things that in it do not align with my

recollection of how the world was then. But anyway, the point is, if you used, I heard from somebody who said they used a BlackBerry because they needed to do SSH and the first iPhone couldn't do SSH connection. Okay, fair enough. And if you wanted to use Excel, you could do that on Windows Mobile. Fair enough. I will grant you that,

but that sort of was not our larger point. That's all I wanted to say. So that was an interesting trend that I heard that we were being dismissive of of apps generally not speaking of of particular applications with very technical people but sort of like the the mass of enthusiastic regular people who were really excited about the iphone even though it didn't run any apps other than the ones that were stock yeah i, I was dumbfounded. Because you know you're saying about how a lot of it, and I agree with you,

we were talking about it last week, that a lot of the book comes from the place of the business writer. And we were talking about the irrelevancy, and you and John spoke about that again on this week's episode. I'm so confused. Episode 30. Episode 30, we'll go with that again on this week's episode. I'm so confused. Episode 30. Episode 30, we'll go with that. Syracuse at times.

And I get that they may be a bit blinded by that. But even from a business standpoint, the iPhone was an incredible success. I don't understand who said it was a bad thing. I don't know. That was just one of the things. I think that's actually, of everything that I've read, that was the thing where I was like,

you guys have got that so wrong, and I don't know who proofread this for you. I don't know who fact-checked this for you, because they missed this. Really, I was very, very surprised by that bit. So, Jason, I have a couple of questions for you in regards to the review of two parts. I want to get into those in a moment.

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up to 10 people for as long as you want. Sign up right now at igloosoftware.com slash upgrade. Thank you so much to Igloo for their support of this show and RelayFM. So Mr. Jason Snell. Yes, Mr. iMichael. You have two parts of your review.

One lives on Macworld and one lives on Six Colors this time, yeah? Yeah. So, Macworld said they wanted me to write the review, and I don't work for them anymore, so they have to pay me to write it, which is fine, because I do freelance work now and i think me writing me writing mac world uh mac reviews is something i'm i know how to do that so i was happy to do that and if they hadn't wanted me to i would have written it on six

colors but they were they wanted me to do the kind of full-on thing for them so so i did and then as with the iphone actually last fall, which is for some different reasons, as I was leaving Macworld, I did sort of like bonus track material on Six Colors with sort of, which we used to do that sort of like both of those stories on Macworld back in the day. So that seemed to be a way for me

to put some MacBook material on Six Colors and link to my review at Macworld. I like it. Well, I mean, it's good because if you're a Six Colors reader link to my review at Macworld. I like it. It's good because if you're a Six Colors reader especially, you kind of get everything because you see the link to the main review and then you get your extra part as well, which is good.

Yeah, and that lets me... I wrote that... I mean, I literally wrote them in order. I turned in my 3500 word review to Susie at Macworld at noon yesterday. And then in the afternoon, I wrote the notebook, which is like all the stuff I couldn't fit in and maybe a little more personal take on some of the things that I was in there. I got to work through some of my feelings about the keyboard. I got to talk a little bit more about the display, which Apple made some interesting decisions with the display.

And yeah, so that was the idea there. I imagine I will write some reviews for Macworld as long as they want to do it. And if the timing and the pay works, then that'll be great. And other stuff, I'll just review on Six Colors and that's fine too. And like I said, people will notice I've written stuff in a bunch of different places. I am definitely trying to have freelance be part of what I do in addition to Six Colors and the podcast stuff.

It's all part of a kind of a whole of me trying to figure out the best way to get to support my family and remain independent, which is what I'm working at here, like you are. Yeah, and you just spread the Jason Snow message far and wide, you know? Well, I think it's good for Six Colors for me to appear, especially Macworld readers who know me but might not

know that I am still doing stuff, that I can provide Macworld readers with the review they expect and that's good. And then also, you know, they can say, oh yeah, that guy, what's he doing now? And I think that's good for me. Right, so we have been asking our listeners

to provide, our upgradians as you may say, to provide their questions via the Ask Upgrade, but I've read through both pieces and I have some questions and comments of my own, if that's okay. Sure. So I kind of want to start off with a big one and maybe

this will help lead into some overall feelings about how you feel about the new MacBook. You got the space gray one, that's right? Yeah. If you were going to design this machine, if Apple came to you today and gave you the power to change stuff about this machine,

what would you change? And this is considering your needs first and then maybe also secondarily considering the needs of the average consumer. You can design two machines if you want to. You had to start with the most outlandish question. Okay, so let me get this straight. So I can make any change I want for me, and then I can make any change I want for everyone else?

Yeah. So, because my feeling about this is like, I think, we'll talk about the keyboard a bit more, but I think that maybe you would change that for you, but wouldn't necessarily need to change it for the world. Yeah, well, wow. The keyboard, for me, the keyboard is the deal breaker. And I'm not sure it's an actual deal breaker or whether it's just the thing that I, I, I like the least about it, but, um, that, that keyboard is not great. It, and it's interesting because talking, uh, to Apple,

I get the sense that, you know, sometimes you have your conversations with people at Apple about products and they're like, they're hitting all the like, this is revolutionary and it's going to be, it's everybody's going to love it. And this is the way things are going to be in the future. I didn't get that sense from them about the keyboard. It felt to me like they were acknowledging, look, we know that the reduced travel, you know, the keys physically just don't move very much up and down. We know that that's a problem, so we've engineered a bunch of other things to try and offset it as much as we can to mitigate it. So they've got the little butterfly mechanism, and they've got the stainless steel things that they're hitting on, and so it makes it look kind of clicky.

It's got the wider wider keys they're more stable they're all these things that they're trying to do all of which is true and I think actually does improve the feel but in the end it still doesn't have very much key travel and feels all you know like I said at the the time when when I went the event, it's like halfway between a real keyboard and typing on an iPad. There's more movement than the iPad where there's physically nothing. You're just hitting glass, but not a lot more. It's pretty dramatic. I think it's less than half of the movement of the standard Apple keyboard.

So I would change that because when I think about buying one of these down the road here, that's the one that I'm like, would I really want that to be the thing that I was doing all my typing on? Would I write, you know, hundreds of thousands of words on that keyboard? And I was able to type. I went to type racer.com, which is my choice for testing my typing speed. And I was able to do 120 words per minute on it. So, you know, I, it was, it was perfectly fine in terms of speed, but I just don't like the feel of it. And I don't feel like I'm a giant keyboard nerd like John Gruber and some other people who are like super obsessive about keyboards in a way that I'm not. I actually like the current Apple keyboard design, but the MacBook keyboard just doesn't work for me. You know, you get used to it, but I didn't like it. So I think that would be what I would change first off is find a way to make a computer that's roughly this thin and light, but have a better keyboard, have more movement in the keyboard.

Maybe it's a magical thing that, you know, when the computer's closed, the keys are all nestled snugly. And then when you open it up, they pop out to reveal more travel. I don't know. I mean, this is why they engineered it the way they did, and they knew it was going to be a compromise, but I don't love it. So that would be the thing I would change. For everybody else, I mean, obviously, I would say you need a second USB port, and that would make things easier, or an old-style USB port, or a Thunderbolt port or something like that just because it would be more flexible that way. I think a second USB-C port even would be

good enough. I would also probably put an adapter in the box but you know that that would be if I had like magic superpowers and there was no like economic reality and technical reality which is it is the product that it is but um you know that would be keyboard for me um dealing with the port issue maybe for everyone else so that question and my next question they're like the reason i'm asking these weird questions is because i want to try and give a sense to people for how you feel about the machine without rehashing the review. So my next question is, you talk about and I know you speak, you are one of the people that speak

very fondly of the 12-inch PowerBook. Yeah. What made you love the 12-inch PowerBook that's missing from this MacBook? Because in theory this is the spiritual successor to that machine. And this is the machine that everybody wanted that machine forever, right 12 they wanted the 12 inch power book and they kind of

got it with the 11 inch macbook air but but just still needed that little thing and i'm i assume that's when they when apple brought this out on stage many people like that's it they've given me the 12 inch power book again the what they did with the 12 inch power book was they put they they said the this is a computer that's defined by the width of the keyboard, and we wanted to make it as narrow as possible, so we'll make it exactly the width of the keyboard. The MacBook is kind of like that, although there's a little bit more. The 12-inch PowerBook is still the narrowest Mac laptop ever. There's a little more space on this than there was on the sides,

and it's a slightly wider keyboard, I believe, than the standard Apple keyboard. Just slightly, but it spreads slightly wider. I think the 11-inch was a perfectly fine spiritual successor to the 12-inch PowerBook. Making this as little as possible is the goal. As light and thin and small as possible is the goal. And the 11-inch Air feels like that, and certainly this MacBook feels like that too. I don't even know what to say beyond that.

I think the 12-inch PowerBook was more of a, it wasn't entirely fully featured, but it had lots of ports and stuff. It was from an era where you needed to have all of the ports. And again, the one port, I actually am not sure which is a bigger deal, the fact that you can't have an external device hooked into it and charge without extra stuff, or whether it's just that USB-C is different and everybody's going to have to buy adapters. I think one of the biggest things is going to be, you know,

if you've got one of these MacBooks and you do presentations, you're going to need to buy probably a couple of different video adapters and just carry them with you everywhere, which is a fact of life that many Mac laptop people had to do in the past. But for the last few years, you could, you know, people, maybe not everywhere, but that mini DisplayPort plug had had a long time to propagate. And so it was a lot easier to assume that the right adapter would be there. And, you know, that's a change with this. Although I think maybe the 12-inch PowerBook had a weird video, like a mini VGA or mini DVI or something that

you always had to carry the adapter around. It's in the ballpark. I think these are all the 12-inch. When it went away, there was sort of nothing for a long time. And, like, I used an iBook for a while, even though I consider myself a pro user. I used an iBook for a while because it was small. And then the 11-inch MacBook Air. And the MacBook definitely fits into that genre. It's very much of the kind, and it is the first one,

because the Air had a lot of extra space on the sides of the keyboard. It is the first Mac laptop since the 12-inch PowerBook to have it. The keyboard is really the constraining feature of the product. I want to come back to the keyboard, because there's some other stuff that you talk about in regards to that. But this is something that many people have spoken about, but I'm interested for your take on it. Do you think it's fair to say that this Mac is the first Mac to take big steps towards being closer to iOS? Like the software has been moving in that direction, but this machine seems to take hardware cues from it too.

in that direction but this machine seems to take hardware cues from it too and i know this this is kind of crossing the line but you mentioned that when you plug in the charging cord it it chimes at you rather than giving you the light so it feels like and you know with the battery and the way that you configure it where you buy it on the store page and you've got colors and you're taking away the the uh the the illuminated logo and putting you, do you feel that this is maybe the first Mac, which is kind of starting to bridge the gap? Yeah, this, this is a Mac designed with, um, I mean, this is a, this is the iPad of Macs. That's how I feel like it is. It's the iPad of Macs. It's, it comes in the iPad and iPhone colors. Um, plug it in, you plug it in with a little thing. And, you know, the USB-C is bigger than lightning, but it's the same kind of shape.

And you plug it in, and it's got the one port. And that port you use for any peripherals you want or for power, just like the iPad. It's got a headphone jack. That's the only other jack on it. It, you know, it chimes when you plug it in like an iPad. If you've got it shut down and you plug it in, the screen will actually light up briefly and tell you how much battery is left. That's a very iPad and not Mac kind of thing to do. It definitely, the feel of it, it's informed by the iPad. It's not an iPad. It's a Mac laptop, absolutely. But this feels like

the premise behind this product was, can we take everything we've learned from the iPad and put it in a MacBook? So let's go back to the keyboard. So right at the start, you kind of open your piece. And he's talking about just the end of the PowerBook. Having a full-size keyboard dictates so much about the design. It gives you your dimensions,

and in some respects gives you your thickness and that kind of stuff. If you want to have a full-size keyboard in this thing, it will dictate a lot of the stuff that you do. And then a quote from your review, you say, if you're not a keyboard snob, you may not even notice the difference, but if there's any single feature that would make me reluctant to buy a MacBook, it would be the keyboard. So I find it interesting that you appreciate, but if there's any single feature that would make me reluctant to buy a MacBook, it would be the keyboard.

So I find it interesting that you appreciate, and it's definitely, I think, is the case, that Apple constrained themselves from a design perspective to incorporate the keyboard in as full a design as it can, but actually then in trying to do other things, they've made the keyboard worse. Do you think that Apple forded themselves by insisting so much of the design focus on the keyboard that in and of itself is makes an inferior typing experience so like they've pushed so they have made like it will be this big because we want a full-size keyboard but the keyboard's still not as good as it could be or

should be anyway so should they have actually then just made the keyboard smaller and made the whole thing smaller? Well, there's a philosophy at work here that is interesting. And it's design. It's all about choices. They decided that thinness was important. They decided, and this is something that I believe Apple has felt for a long time, which is the size of the keyboard is inviolate. You cannot shrink the keyboard, which I had somebody who, at one point, I wrote a story where I was using a netbook that had shrunk down keys, and it was just, it was awful. I could not use it because all the keys now are in completely different positions than I had learned how to type on. And every other keyboard in the world was not like that, but this one was different and it was

terrible and I hated it. And I think Apple said, look, we're not going to mess with that. That is where we're starting here is the keyboard is the size that it is. And that's just how it's going to be. What else can we do? And from Apple's perspective, reducing the travel, but doing these other things to kind of offset some of the issues with it, that was the trade-off that they wanted to make in order to get that, you know, physically to have it be that much thinner so that they didn't have, you know, because the way it works, they have very little room to work here. And so these keys are barely above the metal. And they go down to, you know, essentially flush.

There's not a whole lot. And then there's whatever is under there, the mechanism and the light. It's super narrow. So they decided that they weren't willing to sacrifice the thinness of the computer to have key travel, but they weren't willing to go beyond that. They were not willing to sacrifice the key layout. And fair enough. It's an interesting set of trade-offs to make. And for me, as somebody who, you know, and I want to put this in perspective, I do a lot of writing on a keyboard that this is, you know, other than the talking part that you and I are doing, the other part of my professional life is typing things. In my personal life, because I write like books and stuff that one day maybe I'll get back to when I'm not doing all these podcasts. And so for me, the keyboard really matters. And I type really fast. So I have lots of opinions

about keyboards. So Apple's saying, look, most people aren't going to care. Most people aren't going to care. And we've done some things to offset it, so it's not that big a deal. That could be wrong. People could, you know, they'll do research. I'm sure they'll do research and find out that people, you know, people's satisfaction with the MacBook, maybe it goes down. And one of the reasons why is they don't like the keyboard. Or maybe it doesn't change at all because nobody cares. And then they're like, all right, we made the right call there. The people who really care can use a different device with a different keyboard.

But, you know, the market for this, they're fine with it. And I'm sure they will look at that. And honestly, if what they find is that this keyboard is too great a compromise for a lot of people, then they'll put that on their list of, is there something else we could do to make the keyboard better? And they may already think that. I mean, it doesn't sound very Apple to just accept, well, it's compromised, but whatever, what are you going to do? And then move on. They may still be thinking, are there ways that we can make this better? I hope that they're not thinking it's the best and all of our keyboards will be like this from now on. I hope they're not thinking that. But like I said, I got the vibe when I talked to some people at Apple that Apple was aware that this is a compromise

and that the other things they put into this keyboard were maybe meant to offset the fact that they were taking all that key travel away. Because at some point, you might as well just have it be a touchscreen down there with the Taptic Engine on it and just not even move and just have it be glass. At some point why

even bother with having keys and calling them keys if they travel almost nothing at all you could just fool us like that like they do with the force touch trackpad at that point had you thought of that before you just said that like the idea of them just putting a touchscreen down there yeah yeah sure sure i mean it's at some point you know you could do that and and then you could say oh well and it's programmable it can be anything down there and it can be a control surface and all that i think that's i think that's a long way to go and i think there's a lot of extra technology and that's another screen you have to drive and you know i don't know if that'll ever happen on a Mac, but at some point, your keyboard isn't much more than a touchscreen.

When you've got no travel left or almost no travel, then why is it even there other than to fool you into thinking that the keys move? And now Apple has technology that can fool you. So it's an interesting thought experiment. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, everybody should try it for themselves.

Go to the Apple Store and just type around on it a little bit and you'll see it's a very different kind of experience. The keys don't move very much. And, you know, for a lot of people, they probably don't care. And I think that's what Apple's banking on

is that most people aren't going to care about this. I thought I would get over it after using it for five or six days. I thought I would be used to it. And then I went back to my other keyboard briefly and I was like, oh my, oh thank God. It was just like a huge relief. And then I went back to the MacBook keyboard and I'm like, oh no, this thing again. And that's when I knew I hadn't adapted to it. I had endured it, but I hadn't adapted to it. Are you worried that we're going to see new keyboards in this style?

Do you think that Apple are going to take things they've learned from this keyboard and adapt it out to the rest of the line? You know, the Force Touch trackpad I think would be great everywhere, and I think we will see that everywhere eventually. This keyboard, I don't know. If you had asked me when they announced it, I'd been worried about that they were going to think that this is a thing that they should roll out everywhere. Now, you know, like I said, it seems like Apple is aware that this is a compromise for thinness

and that I hope that means, you know, I hope that's code for we're only going to use this when we really absolutely need something that's super thin and otherwise we're not because it feels like it's too far. I think pushing this into every, if all the new Apple Bluetooth keyboards and all the, you know, even on big laptops have this little tiny thing, I think that would be unfortunate. But, you know, I don't make the rules. but you know i don't i don't make the rules so i'm hopeful that they that they're aware that it is a compromise for thinness and maybe they wouldn't push it into other parts of the the line what about the design so like the the bigger key caps and the san francisco font um yeah we're pretty far down in the weeds when we're talking about the font that letters are printed on a key a keyboard's fine. It's nice.

It's nice. The bigger keys takes some getting used to. I don't like the full-sized left and right arrows with the half-sized up and down arrows. There are a bunch of us who have talked about this today on the Internet. Jim Dalrymple mentioned it. John Gruber mentioned it. Turns out that I navigate arrow keys. I orient my fingers on the arrow keys based on the spacing around the arrow keys, which is now gone.

So now you have to orient based on the fact that there's one key that is split in half, and that's the up and down arrow key. And it's just it's different. I don't I don't particularly like it. I think I think all of it I would get used to the you can you know,. The bigger spread keys mean you can miss more and still hit the key. If you're a less precise typist, that's a good thing. I think it's all fine. For me, it all comes back to the travel. Also, I should say the backlighting I find problematic.

They've got this new backlighting. Everything's individually lit, and that's nice. But some of the keys feel like they're not uniformly lit. Like the escape key, the E, is sort of half lit. And there are some other keys where like the bottom part or the bottom left corner or the bottom right corner, it sort of gets darker, which I don't think is good. I think, you know, that doesn't seem to be up to Apple standards. Does it matter in the end that the escape key is not entirely equally evenly lit from behind? No, probably not.

But it doesn't sound very Apple-like. We've got a bunch of Ask Upgrade MacBook-focused questions, so we should get to those. But before we do that, let's take a moment to thank our second sponsor of this week's episode, our friends over at Smile Software. And today, I want to tell you about PDF Pen Scan Plus. PDF Pen Scan Plus is the app for mobile scanning and OCR. It allows you to scan documents using OCR directly from your iPhone or iPad camera. It's a

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for copying and pasting to other apps. Smile make awesome products. I love their stuff. And PDF Pen Scan Plus is just another example of how they help me personally create like a mobile office. I can work anywhere when I can then, like if I go out for a business lunch, of course, I can use PDF Pen Scan Plus to take a picture of the receipt

and it's done. It's uploaded into Dropbox for me and I can deal with it later. I love this app. It's just another tool in my smile tool belt. PDF Pen Scan Plus is now available in the PDF Business Kit Bundle with PDF Pen for iPad and iPhone for $21.99. So you can get PDF Pen Scan Plus and PDF Pen for iPad and iPhone for just $22. Alone, PDF Pen Scan Plus is $6.99. So you can get PDF Pen Scan Plus and PDF Pen for iPad and iPhone for just $22. Alone, PDF Pen Scan Plus is $6.99 and PDF Pen for iPad and iPhone is $19.99 US. So really, you'd be crazy enough to get the bundle and you can get them all and it'll be fantastic and you'll have everything you need for PDFs wherever you want to be. The best scanner is the one that's

with you. So go and grab PDF Pen Scan Plus from the App Store today. You can learn more about PDF Pen Scan Plus and all the Smile stuff over at smilesoftware.com slash upgrade. Thank you so much to Smile for their support of this week's episode. So, Jason, I'm going to run through some

questions from the Upgradians. We have, at mjedi, is the MacBook a good second Mac, for example, travel or around the house? M-Jedi has a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro. Is this something, if somebody has the means and the desire to have a second laptop,

which is easy to use, nice and portable, would you recommend it in this case? Like how you have your 11. Yeah. Yeah. I think what I would say is what matters more to you,

the keyboard or the screen? If the screen matters more to you, I think the MacBook or the 13-inch Retina. And if the keyboard matters more to you, it's the MacBook Air or the 13-inch Retina. And if the keyboard matters more to you, it's the MacBook Air or the 13-inch Retina. And if power matters more to you and ports and things like that, then it's the Air or the Retina MacBook Pro and not the MacBook. So it really depends on sort of like what you're looking for. And there are choices, which is great.

There are a lot of cranky people talking about this MacBook. It's like, oh, bro, Apple did this. It's terrible and awful because I can't use it. We've talked about that before. Maybe it's not for you. There are a lot of people, it's not a computer for everyone. It definitely isn't. The screen's great. And if you don't care about the issues that I have personally with a keyboard, then it you know, it's light and thin and nice. If you don't care about Retina, you know, you can get a MacBook Air for cheaper. That's faster. So, you know, depends on what your priorities are. Timothy Beattie, do you know, I mean, I've tried to look this up. I can't see it on the website. Do you know how much the upgrade to the 1.3 gigahertz processor will cost?

Do you have any idea? Yeah, I think it's $250. I think somebody looked at that. That was reported. I think it's $250 to make it slightly faster. Okay. We have MJ Huber Jr. I'm going to go with. Basically asking, with a multitude of adapters, will a cinema display work?

And they list off a bunch of different adapters from third parties and Apple, and if you chain them all together. Do you have any idea if this machine can power a cinema display at all? Because what I'd understood is that the chipset just wouldn't allow wouldn't allow for certain things what do you mean do you mean like the thunderbolt display or some other display let's go with a thunderbolt display which i'm pretty sure my understanding is yeah my understanding is thunderbolt and usbc don't talk to each other i i think otherwise if you can if you can chain things together it may support it it does support one external monitor and Apple sells a couple of adapters.

And, you know, I think it would probably drive, you know, not, not, I don't know the details of how big a, I don't have an adapter to drive a monitor with it. So there's nothing I've been able to test with it, but I'm sure it'll, it'll, if you can get it out in the right form, it'll drive sort of a normal sized monitor. It's not going to drive a, you know, 4k display or something, but I'm, I'm sure it will drive your usual kinds of monitors if you adapt them properly. Geohistoria has asked, would you say that the new MacBook could be a good choice for someone who's not used to using computers, like a first computer? Is it a good choice? Is it maybe better than an iPad or not? Oh, wow. I don't know. It's for people who want to use a computer. It's not an iPad. It doesn't

have a touchscreen. It doesn't run those apps. It's a computer. And if it's for somebody who hasn't really had a computer before, I don't know. The MacBook Air is cheaper, but it doesn't have the beautiful display. And then there's the MacBook and the MacBook Pro that have the beautiful display. So it depends on what, again, it depends on what your priorities are. One of the nice things about the MacBook is that it is fitting into a product line. This is not the only laptop. This is one of, if you count the different sizes, one of five essentially choices that you have on Apple's laptop line now.

So Fraser Spears is interested about video performance and how it holds up under thermal stress. And he's kind of given the idea of like if you're watching continuous flash video, let's say you're watching Netflix or something like that. Have you had any kind of problems watching video for long periods of time? Maybe when the machine starts to get hot and also a supplementary question, has the machine got hot? So Fraser, after he after Fraser asked that, I ran Major League Baseball in Chrome streaming video via flash for an hour and a half.

And it didn't stutter and it was perfectly smooth and it doesn't make any noise because there's no fan and the bottom got warm but just warm and sounds like you really wouldn't have enjoyed that homework yeah i i was doing other things i was i was listening to you and casey but i i left it on because i wanted to it was it was like the the new york mets i don't care about the New York Mets, but there was. Sorry, Mets fans. It's your team, not mine. People in the chat room, by the way, are saying that according to Apple, it will drive up to 3840 by 2160 on an external display.

So that's pretty impressive. So you just got to get the k you just got to get the cabling right yeah it could be you kind of like 20 adapters will chain together but if you can get it you can get it if you can get it to work or or probably or buy a cable my guess is going to be or buy a cable so yeah my my second question is have you had it get warm or hot at all because this is a fanless computer yeah just like i said uh about the about uh the mlb streaming that fraser had me try you know flash video streaming just because that makes computers cry um and it was warm on the bottom i that i your mileage may vary it it felt warm to me it didn't feel uncomfortably hot and it was sort of spread

across a lot of the the back which is the, I think the idea there is to, they've got some material that is like acting as the heat sink that's drawing it across the back. And that's the whole idea is that that's where the heat goes out is it radiates out of the metal on the backside of the bottom of the laptop. And it was warm, but it wasn't hot. I don't think there's going to be one of those, i burn my i burn my legs with my macbook i don't think that's uh i don't think that's an issue it's not like the original macbook air my brother actually got a burn mark on his leg from using the original macbook air um but that's a story for another day uh i we have at Scribd I've got a USB A to C cable could the MacBook

charge from a USB charger with it do you know have you tried any of this like those external Mopi packs in theory could you do it I don't have any adapters that will allow me to do any of those things in theory yes it might take forever or charge it only

a little but in theory yes you could charge it in theory you could charge it only a little. But in theory, yes, you could charge it. In theory, you could charge it from another computer probably if you have the right cables. But I haven't been able to try a lot of that because all I really have is the one USB adapter. And it is an adapter to a USB-A female, which means that I can plug in other USB devices like a DVD drive or something, but not connected to a computer because I don't have a, you know, USB-A to USB-A cable. They didn't really make those. You know, they do exist, but, you know, nothing really shipped with one because generally what you have on a USB device is you've got the the uh you know you're either going from the usb a to like a mini or a micro or you're going to that big usb b the the the square instead of the rectangle um and i don't so i don't have the right cables to try a lot of the stuff unfortunately and monoprice just

announced that they've got those cables but that was too late for for review. Kay Bradnam asked, the trackpad looks bigger with a wider aspect ratio. Did this make any difference in day-to-day use? Nope. Feels like a trackpad. Feels, feels, and that's saying something given that it doesn't actually, you know, depress. It's all in your head. But it feels like a trackpad.

It doesn't feel, it feels exactly, as somebody who uses a MacBook Air, it feels exactly the same. OJP UK, how's the performance of photos scoring for a large library and stuff like that? Does the MacBook hold up? So I haven't had a chance to spend any time in photos on the MacBook

because the MacBook I got came with 10.10.2 and I only updated it to 10.10.2. And I only updated it to 10.10.3 yesterday because, of course, they have to build these things and put things on the drive, image the drives and put them in there and then ship them from the factory. And since 10.10.3 came out yesterday, all these MacBooks did not ship with 10.10.3. They shipped with 10.10.2. So my guess is that it works fine because everything else, everything I did try, and I got a lot of questions that were like, well, what about this app? Well, what about this app? Which I totally understand, but it's not possible for me

to use every app. And the reality is the amount of time you spend testing a bunch of different apps, what you find is the exact same thing with all of them. So I did use Logic, for example, because that's an app that I know pretty well and that I can recognize the performance issues, and it didn't have any. Mostly, I mean, one of the big reasons is Logic is so disk-based, and having an SSD means, you know, it runs pretty well. But Photos in particular, I didn't get a chance to use because I didn't have 10.10.3 on it until yesterday afternoon. And so I just haven't tested it. But generally, everything's been fine that I've used. Yeah, it's a little slow.

I find the interface not slow at all, but anything that's like a super intensive calculation, like bouncing a track out of Logic, you know, it takes a lot longer than on my Retina iMac, that's for sure. It's slower when it gets into the processor intensive kind of cranking away at something. You know, it doesn't go as fast. But I never in my regular use of it thought, oh, this thing is so slow. It just never happened. If you try to play a game on it, you would, you know, even though the graphics processor in it is fine, you know, it's slow. It's not going to blow you away. It's not a game machine.

Don't buy it if you want to use it to play games. That would be dumb. Don't do that. But anyway, so photos. Photos, though, in particular, I can't say because it didn't ship with photos. It shipped with 10.10.2, and I spent most of the time using 10.10.2

and not 10.10.3. and I spent most of the time using 10.10.2 and not 10.10.3. We have an email from Van Dan. Van Dan has said, I use an iPad for practically everything. I end up using my MacBook only at work thanks to Xcode and OmniGraffle and some other software. Because of this, I've noticed that the applications that I use tend to have a Mac app, an iPhone app, and an iPad app. I use tend to have a Mac app, an iPhone app, and an iPad app. Considering the MacBook spec, and I'm sure that he, Vandani said, he's sure a lot of users will be looking at getting the MacBook to replace their iPads. Do you think that people will feel that way? And if they do, does it make sense to do this? You know, the, the, the iBook or the, the iPad and the MacBook

are just totally different products. They're totally different products. I don't think there's a continuum there. I think you use a Mac for Mac things and you use an iPad for iPad things. And so, you know, I don't think this is as dramatic a change as maybe you could make it out to be. The 11-inch MacBook Air is already really small, and it's really thin and it's really light. It's not as small and thin and light as the MacBook, but it is pretty close,

and it doesn't have a retina display. That's the big difference. But this is not an iPad. This is a laptop, and you're going to make judgments about it based on whether you want to use a laptop or an iPad. I don't think somebody would say, well, I've been using an iPad,

but I'd really rather just use a Mac, but the MacBook Air is not good enough for me. Oh, now, but now that there's this MacBook, now I'll make the Switch. I don't think that's going to be a I mean, maybe somebody will say that, but like those people who have spreadsheets on their Windows mobile phones in 2006. But I don't think that's a broad statement that lots of people would make so I don't know how to answer that question other than to say that this is a continuation of Apple making the laptops thinner and lighter I don't think it has any impact on the iPad

I doubt there are people using an iPad saying I'd really rather use a Mac for this but the existing Mac offerings are just too big for me it's still a MacBook it's not some weird hybrid so my last question comes again from MJ and I said his second question today if you could get only one which would you

choose the Apple Watch or the new MacBook well I have a MacBook Air 11 so the Apple Watch are you going to be pre-ordering? An Apple Watch? Yeah. Probably. Probably, because I need

to have one. Yeah. I'm still hoping that I can talk somebody at Apple into giving me a review unit to try out, but I can't count on that. And I do need to have one to write about. So I will probably pre-order something.

So I think in summary, the way that I feel from talking to you about this, I wouldn't say you sound down on this machine, but you're not super excited about it, which I think echoes our original expectations, which is this is not your machine. So you're not crazy about it, which I think echoes our original expectations, which is this is not your machine. So you're not crazy about it, but it's got things that are good about it that will be good for some people. But this is not one for you. The USB-C thing is not a hang up for me.

In the end, what I would say what surprised me is that I think only the keyboard is the thing that really is bothering me. If you had the MacBook Air's keyboard on this thing, then I would say, yes, absolutely. The next laptop I laptop i buy and again having a recent model macbook air it's not going to be for a while would be the macbook with this keyboard i'll think about it i'm not you know i'm not entirely sold on it but um but i and i think i do think the keyboard is its weakest point and for a lot of people it won't matter and so that's that's good for them because the weakest point is irrelevant to them and then don't worry about it but to me the usbc stuff is going to take care of itself i think the battery life is pretty good i know that there are some people who reported

that they did like serious uh battery tests and said that it didn't live as long as the uh as the macbook air um that does not, I think Joanna Stern reported that and Recode reported that. That does not match with my usage at all. I suspect that this, the power saving in here is doing some very interesting things that mean it has a long battery life when you use it like a regular person,

but that if you crank everything up and try to deplete the battery really quickly, it depletes quickly. But I don't know if that's something that anybody would really see. For me, it felt like it lasted a lot longer than my 11-inch air. Take that for what you will, because I didn't run any formal tests, because I'm only one person, and if you run a lot of formal battery tests, you've just lost half of your time with the product. So I can't do that. Couldn't do that in Macworld.

Can't do it now. It's just, it's not worth it. If you're really going to do it right, it takes way too much time. It's not worth doing when you're initially reviewing something. So, you know, I think that for a lot of people, running it without it plugged in

and occasionally plugging in an external USB device, which I don't think a lot of people are doing anyway, I just don't think it's a big deal. And it's going to take care of itself in the next six months or in the next year. It's already starting to take care of itself. You buy an adapter, you buy a cable, you move on. So I don't think any of those are really roadblocks. The screen is great. I actually ended up running it on the biggest or, I guess, littlest scaled mode. So I got a little more screen real estate and everything's just a little bit smaller. Looks great.

All the space of like a 13-inch laptop on a 12-inch laptop. You know, there are a lot of things to commend it. I think for me i am just hung up on the keyboard and that's just that's that's my that's my cross to bear and if you're somebody who cares about keyboards then you may care about it too but i think probably most people won't care i want to try it out i want to see if i can feel it i would i don't think i'll be able to like or at least i'll maybe feel a difference but i don't think I'll be able to. Or at least I'll maybe feel a difference, but I don't think it will bother me as it bothers you. So I'm interested.

That's my hypothesis. So whenever it is I go into the Apple Store to try on an Apple Watch, I'll also play around with the MacBook and I'll let you know what I think about the keyboard. Because I'm just not... Obviously I type, like everybody does, but I don't type nowhere near as much as you

do and and i and i think that maybe that i might may be less sensitive to it than than you but we'll see we'll see yeah thank you mr jason snell thank you for doing this today um it's been an interesting experiment into to getting a little bit more uh director's commentary out of this product. A little bonus upgrade time. But we'll be back at our usual time next week for our usual upgrade. Yeah, our regularly scheduled programming will continue on Monday. I just couldn't be away from the show for any longer. I just couldn't allow it. Yeah, I approve.

I appreciate it. After our two, you know, you couldn't allow it yeah i approve i appreciate it after our two you know you couldn't stay away after our two podcasts in person you just couldn't uh you couldn't let it go couldn't let it go if you want to find the show notes for this week's episode of course you can check in your app of choice you'll find links to jason's review i put jim darryl's review in there as well because you mentioned that i'll put jonas stands in too because you mentioned those so you can get uh some differing opinions if if you would like to um so you can mentioned those so you can get some differing opinions if you would like to so you can grab those or you can

go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 31 and you'll see that lovely link list there for you so you can check all those out. If you want to find us on social media there's a couple ways you can do that. You can go to at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L you can find Jason on Twitter there. I'm at

imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. And of course, Jason is the editor-in-chief of the fantastic sixcolors.com, where you'll find all of Jason's great work. Oh, and don't forget The Incomparable, too, because you just should never forget The Incomparable, because it's the best. Award-winning.

Award-winning. Award-winning The Incomparable. You'll win the award of my heart, too, Jason, for the work that you do there. So thank you for doing all of that. And thank you so much for listening to this very special episode. And we'll be back next week.

Bye-bye. Goodbye.