Hardware

iFixIt on the Microsoft Surface Laptop teardown: “You can’t get inside without inflicting a lot of damage.”

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I have long railed against construction that makes phones, tablets, and laptops difficult to repair. But this might be a new low.

As the iFixIt folks make their way through the Microsoft Surface Laptop teardown, it becomes clear that getting inside is no easy task. And these folks are pros at taking things apart. It’s their raison d’etre, their primary gig.

The whole thing turns a bit ugly. Just look at the picture in Step 5. Here’s a quote:

Now that we’ve got a clear look at the plastic, it seems these aren’t reusable clips at all, but weak ultrasonic spot welds that we’ve been busting through. This is definitely not going back together without a roll of duct tape.

Yeesh. I wonder what plan Microsoft has for repairing these units when they start rolling in. Will they simply replace the cover, discard the old?

iFixit’s 2017 iMac 4K teardown

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Hey, there’s a headphone jack!

Lots and lots of interesting stuff here, both in pictures and in the walkthrough text.

The new Microsoft Surface Pro: What that $799 price really means

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Microsoft just rolled out the latest and greatest version of its Surface tablet/laptop hybrid, branded as the Surface Pro. Here’s a link to the official Surface Pro product page.

Much has been made about the Surface Pro’s price of $799. But what do you get for your money?

The $799 Surface Pro ships with:

  • Intel® Core™ m3 processor
  • 128GB SSD
  • 4GB RAM
  • Intel® HD Graphics 615

That’s a pretty bare-bones machine. Apple’s cheapest machine (the $999 MacBook Air) comes with 8GB of RAM. I can’t imagine using a modern version of Windows or macOS with less than 8GB. Let’s tweak that so we can compare apples with Apples.

Bumping the Surface Pro to a minimally livable (in my opinion) 8GB brings the price to $1299. There’s just no cheaper way to get to 8GB without bumping the processor up to the Intel® Core™ i5, which is the same processor in the $999 MacBook Air. To be fair, these are different processor and screen generations, but the price bump from $799 to $1299 to get to 8GB is an important factor.

If you are considering buying a Surface Pro, take a few minutes to step through the configurations and compare the specs with the MacBook Air and 13″ MacBook Pro. And keep in mind the inherent differences between Windows and macOS.

Building a Hackintosh for $70

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[VIDEO] This is insane. Faster than the 13″ MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. For $70. Video embedded in the main Loop post.

Building a Hackintosh without the benefit of tonymacx86

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Jeff Benjamin, 9to5Mac:

In a previous article, posted shortly after Nvidia announced its new Pascal Mac drivers, I briefly discussed my plans to build a new Hackintosh. I’ve been planning and working on the machine for over a week, and I’m finally at the point where I can share the results of my journey.

This isn’t my first Hackintosh build, but it’s the first build where I decided to go about it without the assistance of the excellent tools over at tonymacx86. I’ve been long interested in building a Hackintosh using just the Clover EFI Bootloader, and that’s exactly what I did for this build.

Going about it this way allowed me to learn more about the process, and helped me to see that the entire premise, while tedious at times, is actually fairly straightforward. In this initial post, I’ll talk about some of my reasoning behind my hardware choices, and share some initial experiences and benchmark results.

If you are interested in building your own Hackintosh, I would certainly start my journey with tonymacx86. It’s just too great a resource to ignore. But I get Jeff’s logic. Now you can follow along with Jeff, learn as he learns.

More on updating your old Mac Pro as a capable VR and gaming platform

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Last week, we linked to a post from Daniel Pasco on updating a 2009 Mac Pro:

I turned a 2009 Mac Pro I picked up off of Ebay for $1300 into a superb professional workstation, gaming, and VR platform, simply by adding an SSD drive and a new video card.

Here’s a follow-on post with all the detail on the build, really well written with lots of pictures. Thanks for this Dan, a real service to the community.

Apple to roll their own graphics processors for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Apple Watch

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Imagination Technologies:

Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE: IMG, “Imagination”, “the Group”) a leading multimedia, processor and communications technology company, has been notified by Apple Inc. (“Apple”), its largest customer, that Apple is of a view that it will no longer use the Group’s intellectual property in its new products in 15 months to two years time, and as such will not be eligible for royalty payments under the current license and royalty agreement.

That is a major blow to the company. Their stock dropped about 60% on the news, shaving hundreds of millions off the market value in just one day.

But Imagination will not go quietly:

Apple has used Imagination’s technology and intellectual property for many years. It has formed the basis of Graphics Processor Units (“GPUs”) in Apple’s phones, tablets, iPods, TVs and watches. Apple has asserted that it has been working on a separate, independent graphics design in order to control its products and will be reducing its future reliance on Imagination’s technology.

Apple has not presented any evidence to substantiate its assertion that it will no longer require Imagination’s technology, without violating Imagination’s patents, intellectual property and confidential information. This evidence has been requested by Imagination but Apple has declined to provide it.

Seems clear that Apple is going its own way, that this is more of a license fee negotiation to avoid a complex and costly lawsuit. Though a custom GPU is no trivial task, Apple owns enough chip design experience and can hire any additional GPU-specific expertise they need to make this work.

Note that Apple owns 8% of Imagination and was reportedly in talks to buy the entire company in March 2016 but the talks are said to have ended without an offer. This does smell a bit like a hardball negotiating tactic, with Imagination going public they way they did. Apple’s long advance notification could be the first step in the dance to lower royalties.

Legal issues aside, if Apple and Imagination do part ways, this seems a positive move for Apple, a chance to control even more of the stack, reduce their fabrication costs, and add more graphics power across the product line.

Apple patents accessory that embeds your iPhone into a laptop

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This is like an external keyboard case with a slot for an iPhone (or an iPad), except with this model, there’s an external display that is driven by the iOS device’s processor.

Neat idea. A bit of a missing link between iOS and macOS.

Rare working Apple I heading to auction

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[VIDEO] MacRumors:

In 1976, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak designed and built the Apple I, or Apple-1, the company’s first computer. Of the 175 sold, only 50 to 60 or so remain in existence, including just eight functioning ones, making the iconic machine a rare collector’s item worth significantly more than its original $666.66 price.

This one is coming up for auction in May. Click through to the main Loop post for a video showing the Apple I at work.

Some 2016 MacBook Pros suffering USB drive problems

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Jeff Porten, TidBITS:

If you’re using or considering buying one of the new MacBook Pro models with the Touch Bar (see “New MacBook Pros Add Context-sensitive Touch Bar,” 27 October 2016), be aware that some people are seeing their machines shut down repeatedly and unexpectedly. The problem might be with external hard drives connected via Thunderbolt 3’s USB-C ports, which is, of course, the only way to connect them.

I began researching this after I was unable to copy a large number of files from one external USB drive to another using my new MacBook Pro. The copy was going to take a long time regardless, but when I came back to check on its status, my laptop was powered off and I had to start it up again manually. Restarting the copy additional times resulted in similar shutdowns.

In my case, I was presented with an error message telling me about the shutdown, with the messages “CPU Machine Check Architecture Error Dump” and “CATERR detected! No MCA data found” in the highly technical error report that automatically gets sent to Apple.

Hopefully, this issue, as well as the graphics glitching issue reported yesterday, is a sign of early days with a new architecture, and will be resolved either with a software update (best possible solution) or a design fix (with some repair path for early adopters).

Best Mac and iPhone repair tools

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This is a pretty solid article. Some excellent holiday gift ideas for the techie on your list.

Personally, I swear by this iFixit Tool kit. I’ve owned it for years, done tons of Mac/iPhone and non-Apple repairs with it and it’s never let me down.

MacBook Pro 13″ Touch Bar teardown

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This is one of my favorite iFixit teardowns. More humor, and more surprises (like step 13, where we learn something interesting about the speaker grills, no doubt a basic difference between the 13″ and 15″ models).

Explaining Thunderbolt 3, USB-C, and everything in between

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Glenn Fleishman, writing for TidBITS, does an excellent job walking through the various standards that ultimately connect to the new MacBook Pro via USB-C. Bookmark the link, pass it along.

One point worth highlighting:

This may all seem confusing initially, but it should pass quickly because everything on the market for USB and DisplayPort over USB-C today should work with Thunderbolt 3. The main group that will be disappointed are those who buy Thunderbolt 3 peripherals and expect them to work with a 12-inch MacBook, which doesn’t extend USB-C support to Thunderbolt. We can hope that Apple makes Thunderbolt 3 standard across the entire Mac line.

In addition, there appears to be a compatibility issue with support for older Thunderbolt 3 peripherals. Read about it in this post.

Thunderbolt 3/USB-C adapters, cables, and hubs for new MacBook Pro

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Joe Rossignol did a great job pulling together this list of USB-C dongles and hubs. Bookmark the link, pass it along.

Before you buy, read this caveat. In a nutshell, make sure any hub or adapter you buy is compatible with the new MacBook Pro.

Also, at the high end, OWC has announced this monster 13-port USB-C hub, shipping in February. If you’ve got the need, and the $279 to spend, you can preorder the dock here.

New MacBook Pros will not work with some older Thunderbolt 3 chips

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Pluggable:

The version of OS X on the new MacBook Pros (late 2016) will not work with existing Certified Thunderbolt 3 docks and adapters (released prior to November 2016). These existing devices use Intel’s Thunderbolt 3 chipset (Alpine Ridge) in combination with the first generation of TI USB-C chipset (TPS65982). Apple requires the 2nd generation TPS65983 chipset for peripherals to be compatible.

It’s not clear to me if this impacts all older docks/adapters, but before I made a purchase, I would verify that the dock or adapter in question is compatible with the new MacBook Pros. Even if you don’t have a 2016 MacBook Pro on order, you might order one at some point. Consider it an effort at future-proofing.

Apple’s new MacBook Pro may be the world’s fastest stock laptop

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At the core of the article is Apple’s choice to adopt the speedy PCIe SSD bus technology along with the NVM Express device interface.

By adopting the PCIe/NVMe standard, Apple has been able to deliver higher performance in terms of read/write speeds and latency when compared to traditional SATA-based PC designs.

And:

It’s not a surprise, Handy said, that Apple settled on PCIe, as the price for the controllers are already approaching those of SATA controllers.

“If they both cost the same, then why use SATA?” [industry analyst Jim] Handy said in an email reply to Computerworld.

Interesting.

More detail on the reason the MacBook Pro is limited to 16GB

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A bit more detail on why the new MacBook Pro is limited to 16GB. There’s an email exchange with Phil Schiller, then a Reddit post that talks about the limitation being tied to the choice of CPU. Read the main post for details.

How do I use my new lightning headphones with the new MacBook Pro?

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Here’s a puzzling question, posed in this tweet from Rudy Richter:

@pschiller how do I use my Lightning headphones with the new MacBook Pro?

Think about this for a moment. The headphones that ship with the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus end with a lightning connector. The phones also ship with a lightning to 3.5mm adapter that let you plug 3.5mm traditional headphones into a lightning port.

Still with me?

OK, so how do folks plug their lightning headphones into the new MacBook Pro? Is there any dongle that lets you plug in a lightning end and converts it into 3.5mm mini, or USB-C? What’s needed here is the reverse of the adapter that ships with the phone.

An interesting problem. Not sure there’s a solution. If I hear of one, I will definitely update this post.

UPDATE: Got this suggestion, about using the Apple Pencil adapter to solve the problem. Requires an Apple Pencil, so the idea is not for most, I think. But it did lead me to this adapter. Think it would work? Would also require a USB to USB-C adapter, which I suspect most buyers will buy or have.

Was the Google Pixel built in a mere 9 months? It would explain a lot…

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Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

The most interesting tidbit comes from David Pierce, a senior staff writer at our sister site Wired. Speaking on the Wired Podcast, Pierce said he was told that the Pixel phones had a mere nine months of development time. After asking Google why the phone didn’t have the same level of water resistance as other high-end flagships, Pierce said, “their answer was essentially ‘We ran out of time.’ There apparently had been this plan for a long time, and at the end of 2015, they blew it all up and started over. So they essentially went from nothing to launch in nine months and a week.”

And:

Let’s examine this timeline. Why would Google “blow everything up” at the end of 2015? We can fill in the blanks with a report from Android Police, which claims that Google’s 2016 smartphone lineup was originally going to be built by Huawei.

“Shortly after the Nexus 5X and 6P launched, Google began talks with Huawei to produce its 2016 smartphone portfolio,” the report reads. “Google, though, set a hard rule for the partnership: Huawei would be relegated to a manufacturing role, producing phones with Google branding.” According to the report, Huawei balked at the lack of branding, and “CEO Richard Yu himself ended negotiations with Google right then and there.”

If we put these two accounts together, it’s easy to conclude that Google and Huawei’s talks ate into the development time of the Google/HTC Pixel. When the decision to go with a self-branded phone came down, Huawei walked away, which led to—as Pierce said—Google “blowing everything up” and switching to HTC.

To some, the Ars Technica headline might imply that the Pixel is less than excellent. I’ll leave that to others to judge, but the Pixel certainly has a lot of fans. To me, getting there with only 9 months of dedicated engineering calendar time is incredibly impressive. The backstory is interesting, though.

That new Google phone isn’t water resistant, and I’m sure you can guess why

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At the heart of Google’s new marketing campaign is a razor sharp jab at Apple:

3.5mm headphone jack satisfyingly not new

That headphone jack is an ingress point for water. Obviously, that’s a problem that can be solved (as Samsung does), but Google chose not to, and made a point of chastising Apple for going down that road.

Google is pouring on the marketing here. Spend a few minutes with the official Pixel page. Is this hype, or is this progress?

UPDATE: This is one of those posts where I just shouldn’t have hit enter. Lots of pushback, deservedly so, but we don’t delete posts, so all I can do is say I’ll try to do better.

Google’s new phone, with a not-so-subtle jab at Apple

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[VIDEO in the main post] Google’s new phone, introduced with this text:

Introducing Pixel, a new phone by Google. It has the highest rated smartphone camera. Ever. A battery that lasts all day. Unlimited storage for all your photos and videos. And it’s the first phone with the Google Assistant built in.

And:

With a best-ever 89 DxOMark Mobile score, Pixel’s camera lets you take brilliant photos in low light, bright light or any light.

And:

  • f/2.0 Aperture – For bright, even photos.
  • Large 1.55μm pixels – For great shots in any light.
  • 12.3MP – For sharp, crisp images.

I’ll leave it to the camera pros to do a side-by-side comparison between the Pixel and the iPhone 7 Plus cameras. Bold claim, though.

Oh, and right there in the middle of the video:

3.5mm headphone jack satisfyingly not new

Yeah, we know who that was aimed at.

The one thing to do to make your MacBook Pro live longer

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Keir Thomas walks through the process of rebonding/regreasing his MacBook Pro’s heatsink. Is this necessary? Will it extend the life of your MacBook Pro? Keir says yes, and he’s got the tech chops to make this look relatively easy.

Though I love getting my hands dirty, I think I’ll hold off on this one until I get my hands on a new MacBook Pro. That said, I found this post and the accompanying pictures fascinating and well worth the read. And, sure enough, his MacBook Pro runs much cooler after his tweaking is done. Cool.

Jet Black iPhone 7 Plus pre-orders shipping sooner than expected

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Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors:

Many customers who pre-ordered a Jet Black iPhone 7 Plus received shipping estimates ranging into October and November, but it appears Apple is working hard to overcome supply constraints and get shipments out earlier than expected.

Starting this morning, MacRumors began hearing reports from customers who originally had deliveries scheduled for a month or two out but will now be receiving their devices over the course of the next few days.

No early delivery love for my iPhone 7 Plus, at least not yet. Holding out hope, though. Glad to see this bit of news.

The iFixit iPhone 7 Plus teardown

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A few things really struck me while making my way through this teardown of the iPhone 7 Plus.

The iPhone cover/display flips to the side, like opening a book. Good to know this if you ever plan to open yours.

The edge of the iPhone cover is rimmed with a caulk-like adhesive, which acts like a gasket to keep liquids out, aid waterproofing (water-resistancing?)

The iPhone is filled with lots of tri-point screws, similar to the ones used inside the Apple Watch.

Finally, I found this to be an incredibly good looking design, at least to my untrained eye. Good stuff.

The advantages that come with Lightning headphones

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Kevin Fox:

Bluetooth, maligned early on for sub-par connectivity and audio quality, has come a very long way, and within a few years wired headphones will be seen as much an outlier as a wired mouse or trackpad. It’s Apple’s style to predict and support this transition at the hardware level by taking away the safety net of a headphone plug that hasn’t changed fundamentally since the ¼” jack was introduced 138 years ago. Nobody alive today has ever known a world without this plug.

To put it bluntly, headphones that plug into the 3.5mm jack are dumb. Literally. At the base level, they’re just wires conducting current to tiny speaker coils, without electronics at all. Sure, some are smarter with inline controls or analog signal processing such as bass boosting or noise cancellation, but most headphones are just dumb wires. And we know how Apple feels about wires, even if they’re pretty smart.

Read the post for details on the vast improvements that will come with Lightning connected headphones and thoughts on the evolution of existing products, like the MacBook Pro, that currently ship with a 3.5mm port.

No need for a Hackintosh, here’s how to breathe new life into an old iMac

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Andrew Leavitt, writing on Medium:

You need only spend $171 for your anemic 27” iMac to run macOS Sierra, boot in seconds and open applications in a blink. Or you can buy a used one and upgrade it for just $500 starting from scratch. You really only require the latest models if you are working frequently with 4K video.

A machine that was originally built in 2009 can easily perform past another 5–10 years with a few straightforward upgrades. CraigsList has these computers lightly used for as little as $325 if you are patient. For another $171 in parts you can rock a machine almost matching today’s specs. And if you are presently struggling with an older iMac the decision is even easier (c’mon, it’s less than $200 and just an hour of tinkering). It’s fun and you might even learn something. Keep in mind that a new 27 iMac has a base price of $1800 (that’s with a 5K screen but no SSD and only 8GB of RAM). Boom, you just saved $1300.

[…]

The world’s largest SSD is now shipping for $10,000

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The Verge:

That’s where the Samsung PM1633a SSD comes in, clocking in at a massive 15.56 terabytes (or 15,360,000,000,000 bytes) of storage. Such power comes at a price, however, with preorders for the 15.56 terabyte behemoth coming in at around $10,000. The 15.56 TB size is not only the largest SSD ever made, but the largest single hard drive ever, finally breaking the 10 TB barrier that spinning disk drives seem to be capped at.

The drive’s small size and huge storage capacity means that you’d be able to outfit a standard 42U server storage rack with 1,008 PM1633a for a cool 15482.88 TB (over 15 petabytes) of storage, to presumably store a spare copy of the known universe. (Assuming you can afford the $10,080,000 price tag for such a setup.)

See main post for a link, in case you want one.