Feh.
Hate to hear this. Had high hopes that the MacBook keyboard issues were behind us. I will add that my son’s machine (a 2017 model purchased earlier this year) has the same issue.
Check out the article URL, a nice little side comment in those last 13 characters.
One final note: Check out this video showing a warranty-voiding fix to the spacebar problem. Fascinating, but definitely not something you want to try at home.
[VIDEO] The title put me off, but I dove in anyway (the video, per usual, is embedded in the main Loop post). And it was worth it.
There’s a lot goin on in this video. Sometimes the value is not in the tip itself, but in the journey, the exploration, the techniques involved in bringing the tip to life. A lot of little nuggets here. Worth your time.
Good read, all the way through. Useful stuff, pass it along.
Come on. What could be so secret? But yup, Sharon Zardetto, writing for TidBITS, reveals some stuff that, at the very least, is not well known. For example:
If an item has a dedicated function key—as do volume control and screen brightness, for instance—press Option and the function key to go to its preference pane. This trick also works with the Touch Bar.
Lots of detail here, terrific work.
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
Apple on Tuesday reported that it sold 3.72 million Macs in its third quarter, which spanned April 1 through June 30, the fewest in any single quarter since it sold 3.47 million in the third quarter of 2010.
And:
There are a number of possible explanations for the decline, including consumers increasingly shifting towards the iPhone and iPad. Together, those devices accounted for 65 percent of Apple’s revenue last quarter, compared to just 10 percent for the Mac. Apple even markets the iPad as a computer replacement.
The bigger reason, however, may have been that nearly the entire Mac lineup was outdated last quarter. Beyond the iMac Pro, released four months before the quarter began, no other Mac had been updated since 2017 or earlier.
I find it no wonder that Mac sales are down. The only updated machines have been dogged by the keyboard reliability issue. As I said yesterday, I think the new warranty and anti-crumb membrane are enough to make me bullish on the new MacBook lineup.
The other Mac elements that need to line up here are the new Mac Pro and the Mac mini. The question is, does Apple truly care about the Mac as more than just a balance sheet line item?
Apple just killed the App Store Affiliate Program. Presumably, the goal there is to maximize services revenue.
Apple is holding fast to a paltry 5GB of iCloud base storage. Presumably, this goes to maximize services revenue as well.
Is this “maximize revenues” logic correct? Apple is not communicating any other message, even in the face of howls from their loyal base.
Is the Mac becoming an afterthought? Will we ever see a new Mac mini? How about a new Mac Pro? And what’s the status on the AirPower charging mat?
My two cents? I think Apple should come out and address all of this. I get playing cards close to the vest, but sometimes you need to let the troops know you feel their pain, give them reason to hope.
We’ve stuck with you through thick and thin. But more and more, the relationship is feeling more like financial calculation than shared passion. Just saying.
I just replaced my 2015 MacBook Pro with a brand new 2018 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Lots has been written about Touch Bar over the last few years, so I’m going to focus on two things. [Jump to the main Loop post for the deets]
Marco Arment:
Sometimes, you just need Low Power Mode: the switch added to iOS a few years ago to conserve battery life when you need it, at the expense of full performance and background tasks.
There’s no such feature on Mac laptops, but there should be.
This is a fascinating read and this suggestion would be a perfect add to the System Preferences Energy Saver page.
Another earnings call, another excellent, detailed set of charts from Jason Snell.
Jump down to the section of Mac sales:
Mac sales were down 13 percent year over year, and revenue was down five percent. It’s understandable given the environment—the year-ago’s quarter saw new MacBook Pros being released in June, while this year they didn’t release until July, after Apple’s third quarter ended.
That last bit is critical. As you read the reaction to Apple’s earnings, you’ll no doubt run into the “Mac is doomed” take, based on the numbers released yesterday. But, as Jason points out, the new MacBook Pro lineup, with its third generation, membrane protected keyboard and Apple keyboard exchange program in place, kicked in after the 3rd quarter ended.
Too early for sales numbers on the new Macs but, I will say, I’ve been waiting for the keyboard brouhaha to resolve itself and this new warranty and anti-crumb membrane were enough for me to buy in. I bought my new MacBook Pro last week and I am really happy with it.
My experience, as well as chats with other folks I’ve spoken with who’ve also been waiting to buy a new Mac, makes me bullish. I think we’ll see a nice upward slope on the next set of Mac numbers. My 2 cents.
Rene Ritchie does an excellent job digging through all the bits and pieces, pros and cons, that make up the new MacBook Pro. If you are considering a new machine, this is a worthwhile, detailed read.
What it’s like shopping for a new Mac at Best Buy. The slamming it down thing? Don’t try this at home.
[VIDEO] Dave Lee started this whole thing, and this is him taking Apple’s new patch for a spin to see if things really are fixed (video embedded in main Loop post). Good results, thoughtful take on thinness and compromises.
One side note: The day before this patch hit, I tweeted about a Reddit take on thermal throttling. The Reddit take implied that the issue was an issue with the Voltage Regulator Module and not the CPU. This was the first take I saw that implied that this issue was fixable in software and not an Intel i9 issue, not a hardware heat sink issue (at least not completely).
The Reddit take has also been updated to reflect Apple’s patch. All very interesting. Glad this is resolved.
Sam William Smith:
The font picker is one of the most commonly used drop down menus in any creative application. Despite this, the default font picker on macOS has remained largely unchanged since the early days.
What I like about this relatively simple redesign is that it follows the pattern that Apple established in the Mac emoji picker, with sections for frequently used and favorited emoji/fonts.
I’d like to see this pattern become a standard throughout Apple’s design language. For starters, it’d be nice if the iOS emoji picker allowed you to favorite emoji, as you can in macOS.
Juli Clover lays out the change from iOS 11 to iOS 12 that simplifies the process of closing out an app. On an iPhone X.
Good to know.
To me, just another sign of how splintered things have become. There’s iOS vs macOS, iPhone vs iPad, iPhone X gestures vs home button gestures, etc. Add to that the large set of features hidden behind 3D-touch. A lot to remember.
[VIDEO] Can’t believe this is real (video embedded in the main Loop post). How did that little critter get inside the screen?
I vote for Timothy to take the machine to the Apple Store and just record everything that goes on.
UPDATE: From Jason Snell’s similar spidey experience, posted last September [H/T Matthew Cassinelli]:
Yep. That’s a teeny, tiny spider, wedged between the screen and the glass. 1600 pixels from the right edge of the screen, 840 pixels down. The size of one of the red/yellow/green stoplight buttons on the left side of my window’s title bars. A 20-by-20 pixel area covered by the body of a spider.
And:
You may be saying to yourself, how bad is it, really? Can’t you live with a spider in your display at all times? The answer, after one week, is… no, I don’t think I can. Not if I can avoid it.
Jump to Jason’s post for a picture. And no, I couldn’t live with this either. No chance.
Jeff Carlson, TidBITS:
You may not even have noticed that your Mac is now running APFS. To find out, open Disk Utility, click your startup disk in the sidebar, and look under the disk name.
As Jeff suggests, take a minute to launch Disk Utility, click on your startup disk and look at the text underneath the volume name. Mine says “APFS Volume • APFS (Encrypted)”.
This is a terrific read, chock full of detail on APFS, but very readable. And the fact that the transition to APFS has been so seamless for so many says a lot about the APFS engineering team.
I was doing research for a post yesterday and I stumbled on this Stanford University page dedicated to the marketing campaign for the original Macintosh.
Lots of links here, a dive into a wonderful rabbit hole of Apple history.
Reddit user Nucleam pulled together an extensive archive of iOS and Mac wallpapers released over the years, gathered, a bit ironically, in Google Photos.
This is a wonderful collection, a trip back in time, and a solid community resource.
[H/T Mike Rundle]
iFixit:
The 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard is a wealth of secrets—it just keeps surprising us. Just when we think we’ve exhausted one vein of tasty tech ore, we find something new. And today, we bring this trove to you.
And:
We pumped this keyboard full of particulates to test our ingress-proofing theory. We started with a fine, powdered paint additive to add a bit of color and enable finer tracking (thanks for the tip, Dan!). Lo and behold, the dust is safely sequestered at the edges of the membrane, leaving the mechanism fairly sheltered. The holes in the membrane allow the keycap clips to pass through, but are covered by the cap itself, blocking dust ingress.
And:
On the 2018 keyboard, with the addition of more particulate and some aggressive typing, the dust eventually penetrates under the sheltered clips, and gets on top of the switch—so the ingress-proofing isn’t foolproof just yet.
I do appreciate the testing, good to know the threshold at work here. Bottom line, don’t dump a bunch of powder or sand on your keyboard and you should be fine.
If you want a more traditional, picture-laden keyboard teardown, iFixit has that too.
And on a related note, here’s John Gruber’s take on the legal/marketing side of the new keyboard, and the quieter vs. better at keeping out debris language.
Yesterday, we wrote about Dave Lee’s experiment with his high-end Intel i9, showing that under load, it got hot enough to trigger throttling, which slowed it down enough to be a problem.
One of the arguments made about Dave’s experiment is that it was specific to Adobe Premiere and possibly due to Premiere not being optimized for macOS.
Jeff Benjamin, writing for 9to5Mac, put his i9 MacBook Pro on the line to test this theory. Jeff did his testing with Apple’s own Final Cut Pro X (and a different model freezer).
I won’t spoil the conclusion (follow the headline link and read through Jeff’s well written walkthrough, don’t miss the update with John Poole’s take at the very end), but this line made me laugh:
The freezer is good for short term performance on the MacBook Pro, but may prove to be an inconvenient/hazardous working environment (condensation is bad, folks).
Well said.
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
Some customers have been hoping that Apple will start swapping out second-generation keyboards with third-generation keyboards, as part of its service program, but MacRumors has learned that isn’t the plan.
When asked if Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers will be permitted to replace second-generation keyboards on 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pro models with the new third-generation keyboards, if necessary, Apple said, no, the third-generation keyboards are exclusive to the 2018 MacBook Pro.
This isn’t terribly surprising, as the architecture of the new machines has changed and the swap-out goes way beyond simply swapping keyboards. But it is good to know.
[VIDEO] A new video is making its way around the net, under the title “MacBook Pro 15 (2018) – Beware the Core i9”. The video (embedded in the main Loop post), is a reasonably measured analysis of one specific new MacBook Pro model, the highest end, spec’ed with a 2.9GHz 6-core Intel Core i9 processor.
Before we get into the video at all, the issues Dave Lee raises are specific to this configuration. I’ve seen not seen anything to make me believe the over-throttling Dave encountered occurs on lower-spec’ed models. Per usual, ping me if I’ve missed anything, or if you see someone encountering this issue with, say, a 2.6GHz 6-core i7.
On to specifics:
Dave runs an Adobe Premiere render on Mac and Windows, the Mac using the i9, and the Windows machine using an i7. Under high load:
In this specific case, with this specific configuration, with this specific i9 chip, the MacBook Pro runs hotter and slower under intense load.
Dave then sticks his MacBook Pro in the freezer and repeats the experiment, and the thermal throttling is significantly reduced, as the Mac no longer has to throttle performance to keep the machine from overheating.
I’d be very interested in seeing this experiment repeated by other folks. Thermal throttling is not the villain here. It’s about the ability of the Mac itself to dissipate heat efficiently. Once the chip heats up, that’s when thermal throttling kicks in.
Watch the video, draw your own conclusions.
John Poole, Primate Labs:
Apple announced updated 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros last week. Let’s take a quick look at the performance of these new laptops using Geekbench 4 results from the Geekbench Browser.
For those unfamiliar with Geekbench 4, it is our cross-platform CPU and GPU benchmark. Higher scores are better, with double the score indicating double the performance.
Note that Geekbench scores tend to improve over time, as startup tasks like iCloud syncing tend to eat CPU time when a machine is first configured. Once those “one time” tasks are completed, usually after a few days, they no longer skew the results.
Benchmarks like these offer a nice way of comparing apples to apples when you are considering a move from one machine to another. If your workload includes very specific, repetitive, high-intensity tasks (such as audio or video rendering, for example), you might want to seek out benchmarks comparing results for those specific tasks.
iFixit:
Here’s an inflammatory take for you: Apple’s new quieter keyboard is actually a silent scheme to fix their keyboard reliability issues. We’re in the middle of tearing down the newest MacBook Pro, but we’re too excited to hold this particular bit of news back:
Apple has cocooned their butterfly switches in a thin, silicone barrier.
First things first, this is indeed an inflammatory take, joining countless other headlines lambasting Apple and the MacBook butterfly keyboard.
But, the thing is, it looks like Apple has, indeed, addressed the problem. That thin, silicone barrier looks designed specifically to keep dust and crumbs from embedding themselves beneath the key press mechanism.
Not sure why Apple never came right out and said, “Our bad, we missed the dust problem with these keyboards, but we’ll fix it.” Is this lawyer-driven? A concern about class-action lawsuits and liability?
No matter, it seems to me that this 3rd generation keyboard is the fix. I’ve typed on it and I am comfortable with the feel and sound. Until I bring one home, I’m not sure how I will feel about the Touch Bar and the soft escape key, the boxier arrow keys, but I do like the keyboard feel and feel optimistic that the dark days of dust breaking the keyboard may just be behind us.
There’s a nice video embedded in the iFixit article that walks through the problems with the keyboard and shows the silicon membrane, up close. Apple keyboard cover-up. Get it?
Austin Mann is a photographer who regularly puts Apple gear through its paces, often in remote and beautiful locales.
Austin got his hands on one of the brand new, 2.9 GHz, 32GB, 4TB MacBook Pros. From his review:
I’m deep in the mountains and wasn’t able to run many side-by-side speed tests, but I did manage to set up one test and the results were surprising.
The test was simple: convert a 4K Mavic Pro video file to 1080p H.265 (HEVC) using QuickTime Player (File > Export As > 1080p > Check “Use HEVC”).
I have three different MacBook Pros, all on macOS 10.13.6, all running QuickTime 10.4, all with the original file on the internal drive and exporting to the internal drive. Here are the results:
- My daily MBP until I discovered these results: 2.3 GHz i7 MacBook Pro (15″, Late 2013, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) = 1980 seconds (33 minutes)
- Top-of-line 2016 MBP: 2.9 GHz i7 MacBook Pro (15″, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) = 99 seconds
- This top-of-line 2018 MBP: 2.9 GHz i9 MacBook Pro (15″, 32 GB RAM, 4 TB SSD) = 24 seconds
Those are some impressive results. Obviously, you’ll have to pay for the privilege, but if you are considering a purchase, this is a nice data point.
There’s lots more in Austin’s review. Take a look.
Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:
Apple managed to keep the lid on its plans to update the MacBook Pro yesterday. It was clear that it would need to support the latest Intel processors at some point, but nobody knew the launch date.
Which would be annoying, to say the least, if you’ve recently bought the 2017 model. The question is, will Apple let you exchange it for the 2018 one … ?
The answer, as in many things, is ‘it depends.’
If you bought a MacBook Pro within, say, the last month, I would definitely give this a read. Might just help you snag a brand newest machine.
Apple:
The new MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar feature 8th-generation Intel Core processors, with 6-core on the 15-inch model for up to 70 percent faster performance and quad-core on the 13-inch model for up to two times faster performance — ideal for manipulating large data sets, performing complex simulations, creating multi-track audio projects or doing advanced image processing or film editing.
And:
Additional updates include support for up to 32GB of memory, a True Tone display and an improved third-generation keyboard for quieter typing.
There are new 13-inch and 15-inch models, with up to 2TB SSD on the 13-inch model and up to 4TB SSD on the 15-inch.
Also new to MacBook Pro is the Apple T2 chip, first introduced in iMac Pro. With the Apple T2 chip, MacBook Pro now delivers enhanced system security with support for secure boot and on-the-fly encrypted storage, and also brings “Hey Siri” to the Mac for the first time.
On the 15″ processor:
6-core Intel Core i7 and Core i9 processors up to 2.9 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 4.8 GHz
On the 13″ processor:
Quad-core Intel Core i5 and i7 processors up to 2.7 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 4.5 GHz and double the eDRAM
And:
The new MacBook Pro is also part of Apple’s Back to School promotion starting today and available to college students, their parents, faculty and staff through the Apple Education Store. The promotion includes a pair of qualifying Beats headphones with the purchase of any eligible Mac or iPad Pro for college, as well as education pricing on Mac, iPad Pro, AppleCare, select accessories and more.
Here’s a link to the US Higher Education site.
The new models are available today and start at $1,799 and $2,399 respectively.
Chris Wilkinson, Ars Technica:
I was browsing a local online classifieds site and stumbled across a gem: a Macintosh IIsi. Even better, the old computer was for sale along with the elusive but much-desired Portrait Display, a must-have for the desktop publishing industry of its time. I bought it the very next day.
It took me several days just to get the machine to boot at all, but I kept thinking back to that article. Could I do any better? With much less? Am I that arrogant? Am I a masochist?
Cupertino retro-curiosity ultimately won out: I decided to enroll the Macintosh IIsi as my main computing system for a while. A 1990 bit of gear would now go through the 2018 paces. Just how far can 20MHz of raw processing power take you in the 21st century?
If you are even mildly curious about this experiment, I urge you to follow the link. It does not disappoint. A geek’s delight, a worthy rabbit hole.
Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal:
Many manufacturers are already using mobile chips from smartphones in laptops running Google’s Chrome OS, and are starting to put them in laptops running Microsoft Windows. Apple Inc. already designs its own chips, which are arguably the fastest mobile processors in the world—will it use them in its own MacBooks?
And:
Imagine something that looks like a MacBook and works like a MacBook, but has the guts of an iPhone. In addition to things like facial recognition and AR capabilities, it could have longer battery life, built-in always-on connectivity to fast 5G networks, and more.
And:
Last September, Apple declared that its A11 processor, which powers the iPad Pro tablet, was already faster than 80% of the Windows notebooks sold in the past year. The iPhone X’s A11 Bionic is even faster.
And:
“You see Intel delaying new technologies anywhere from six to eight months, and that hurts Apple’s roadmap,” says Ben Bajarin, an analyst at market- research firm Creative Strategies. “Apple in particular doesn’t want to have to be hamstrung.” By using its own silicon, Apple could potentially offer machines that do things other notebook manufacturers might not match for some time, he says.
This is all speculation, not news. Will Apple build a Mac of some stripe with an ARM processor as the main CPU (as opposed to the Touch ID ARM chip in some MacBook Pros, which are task specific)? That does seem to be the way the wind is blowing.
The benefits are clear. More of the stack for Apple to control (though manufactured by TSMC, Apple controls the design of chips like the A10X). An ARM chip would bring longer battery life, and could bring mobile capabilities like Face ID and on-chip AI for blazing fast machine learning and augmented reality processing.
Could this yield even thinner laptops? Before they do that, I’d hope that Apple considers making the keyboards and battery easier to replace. I’d gladly give up thinness for a speedier turnaround to fix a problem like that.
Imagine a keynote slide where Phil Schiller explains how much easier a keyboard or battery swap-out will be. That’d get my vote.
At first blush, this might seem like a typical “Apple is doomed” kind of article. There certainly is a bit of that slant.
But this piece goes a lot deeper than that. There is a lot of detail on the construction of the MacBook butterfly keyboard, the difference between the 1.0 and 2.0 revs, and on exactly why these mechanisms fail when they do fail. With pictures.
A few tidbits, from a much longer story:
The basic flaw is that these ultra-thin keys are easily paralyzed by particulate matter. Dust can block the keycap from pressing the switch, or disable the return mechanism. I’ll show you how in a minute.
And:
So you can’t switch key caps. And it gets worse. The keyboard itself can’t simply be swapped out. You can’t even swap out the upper case containing the keyboard on its own. You also have to replace the glued-in battery, trackpad, and speakers at the same time. For Apple’s service team, the entire upper half of the laptop is a single component. That’s why Apple has been charging through the nose and taking forever on these repairs. And that’s why it’s such a big deal—for customers and for shareholders—that Apple is extending the warranty. It’s a damned expensive way to dust a laptop.
And:
Thin may be in, but it has tradeoffs. Ask any Touch Bar owner if they would trade a tenth of a millimeter for a more reliable keyboard. No one who has followed this Apple support document instructing them to shake their laptop at a 75 degree angle and spray their keyboard with air in a precise zig-zag pattern will quibble over a slightly thicker design.
This is design anorexia: making a product slimmer and slimmer at the cost of usefulness, functionality, serviceability, and the environment.
I hope Apple’s next MacBook and MacBook Pro releases learn a lesson from all this. I hope that the next rev of Apple’s laptops are more easily repaired. I just replaced a fan in an old MacBook Air. It cost me $8 for a new fan and took about 10 minutes to do.
This is better on all sorts of levels. I saved money buying an Apple product, I didn’t lose my laptop for a week, and I was able to keep my laptop alive. I realize that last bit goes against a corporate goal of pushing me to buy, buy, buy, but Apple is better than that. They care about the environment, at the cost of maximizing shareholder value. To me, this is another example of that same tradeoff.
Bottom line, I anxiously await the next generation of MacBooks. I want to believe.
Jason Snell, Macworld:
You probably already know about Dark Mode and desktop Stacks and Gallery View, but they are just the top-level features in a surprisingly deep update. There are other fun features hiding just beneath the surface.
Here are some of my favorite “hidden” features of the Mojave beta.
Read the post, all good stuff, but this is by far my favorite:
Taking screenshots on the Mac isn’t remotely new, but in Mojave it’s been given a friendly interface, all hiding behind the keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-5.
And:
When you type that shortcut, a floating palette appears that offers you all sorts of options—all of which have been available before, but not in one place. You can grab the entire screen, just a window, or a selection. You can easily change the default folder for saving screenshots, which used to require a trip to the Terminal. You can record video screenshots, which used to require a trip to QuickTime Player. You can take timed screenshots—giving you five or ten seconds to set up the screen exactly as you want it—which was a feature previously available in the venerable Grab utility.
I love this move. The minute you get Mojave installed on your machine (which you’ve carefully backed up), give command-shift-5 a try. Worth it.