Wednesday, June 28, 2017

The MacBook Adorable

Casey Liss:

To me, the real bummer is the lack of USB-C power passthrough on most USB-C devices available for sale today. As an example, when I attempted to do my initial Time Machine backup, I did so via the Ethernet dongle. However, I had to ensure the machine didn’t sleep, since it was on battery power. Furthermore, I had to stress out about whether or not it would complete the initial backup before the battery gave up, since I had no way to power the MacBook and have it connected via Ethernet.

[…]

I opted to get a maxed-out MacBook Adorable. It has the don’t-call-it-a-m7 i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a half-terabyte SSD. For such a small computer, it was far from cheap, at around $2000.

Intel’s naming seems to be almost intentionally confusing. In this case, i7 means that it’s the high-end version of the low-power Core M processor. The i7 line name goes all the way from 3.5 W in the MacBook to 91 W in the iMac. This dual-core 1.4 GHz processor is slower than the i7 in the 2009 MacBook Pro and even the i5 in the MacBook Air.

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Couldn't agree more with Casey's sentiments. I have the 2015 MacBook. Yes it's a little slow on paper (even compared with the 2017 MacBook), but I can still work quite happily in Xcode, Emacs and even light editing in Lightroom & Photoshop. The screen is stunning too, and surprisingly spacious given its diminutive physical size. Overall the MacBook provides a wonderful combination of form factor, convenience and productivity - I love it :-)

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