The “Poor” 13″ MacBook Pro

The 13″ MacBook Pro has been getting beaten up pretty severely by certain commentators recently. Actually, ever since Apple released the re-jiggered MacBook Air in October 2010, that particular portable has received more than its fair share of beatings.

Well, I’m here to toss some love to the poor 13″ MacBook Pro.

First off, I’m extremely biased, having owned two 13″ MacBook Pros, but I’m not blind to the fact that the 13″ MacBook Pro is now, perhaps, the one Apple product that seems the most out of place. While the MacBook Air is receiving almost universal praise and the 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros continue to hold down their positions as the larger-and-higher-end portables offered by Apple, the 13″ MacBook Pro gets stuck between the two by having some higher-end components (faster processors, larger RAM capacity, Firewire 800 port, etc.) coupled with more weight, a poor screen (still at 1280×800), and no standard SSD (while the Airs come with ONLY an SSD).

Because of this, Marco Arment and Ben Brooks have maybe rightfully been beating up on the 13″ Pro. They have a hard time seeing where this machine might fit in for a person choosing a new Apple portable.

It really comes down to a number of factors.

RAM Potential

I can’t speak much because I’m still running at only 4GB in my 2011 13″ MacBook Pro, but I will soon be picking up the full 8GB to max it out. That’s fully double what you can put into a 13″ MacBook Air (or an 11″ Air), and can make a HUGE difference when you are running one or more virtual machines for whatever purpose.

Don’t underestimate what that can mean for a person who wants to be able to run with just a single machine, filling in whatever holes they might have with a dedicated VM for either testing, or that pesky Windows app that you need to have access to for work (I’m looking at you Microsoft Access 2010).

Size

A portable, by its definition, should be easily portable. The 15″ MacBook Pro is too large for me to comfortably take back and forth between work and home. Granted, I do not carry much with me at all other than a light case and the MacBook Pro, and I do use a case meant specifically for 13″ portables, so the extra size of the 15″ would make a difference.

The MacBook Air would be more portable, but the RAM potential above is something that can’t be completely ignored by everyone.

Expansion

An odd thing to think about with a portable, but the ability to purchase off-the-shelf RAM and hard drives to stick into my machine is something that appeals to me. Right now there is a 500GB hard drive in this little guy, but I won’t hesitate to drop a newer drive in here at some point to gain some performance increases or storage capacity … if there would be a need.

Processor Speed

The dual-core Intel Core i7 is a pretty speed processor, not getting hampered by the ultra-low-voltage requirements of a machine the size of the Air. The Air is mighty fast and impressive, but if you need processing power in a small package, the 13″ MacBook Pro is pretty attractive.

Conclusion

Even with all of that above, the 13″ MacBook Pro, sadly, is not long for this world unless some major changes happen. I think that the first thing that needs to change is the screen. Having a 1280×800 screen on this while the 13″ MacBook Air has a 1440×900 screen seems almost criminal, and it will need to change. I have to think that if this single change happened (along with maybe the option for quad-core Core i5 or i7 processors) that some people would be appeased.

However, Apple is probably going to drop the 13″ MacBook Pro completely, maybe the next major redesign of the MacBook Pro line. With that, the portable lineup from Apple becomes crystal clear: 11″ and 13″ MacBook Airs and 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros. That’s a decidedly less-confusing lineup than what they have.

However, I will miss the 13″ MacBook Pro. That line has served me well.

The BBEdit Trial: A Week In

So things were greatly complicated this prior week by the birth of our second son, Levi. Because of this, I was unable to really give BBEdit a test run, but the next month is going to provide more opportunity than I could possibly want. With two website deadlines approaching, I’ll have BBEdit open every day from this point forward.

So far, in the little time I have spent with it, I have been forced many times to repeat this phrase in my head:

BBEdit is not TextMate.

It happens to be something I need to keep in my mind as I try to actually evaluate the text editor on its own merits. BBEdit allows you to edit text files … which is already a point in its favor.

To reiterate the reason I’m doing this, BBEdit 10 is a major release that coincided with the release of Mac OS X Lion. BBEdit has been around for a LONG time, but it has been continuously updated not just for Mac OS X Lion, but made the transition from PowerPC to Intel and from Mac OS to Mac OS X. That’s dedication.

That’s the kind of dedication that I take comfort in, knowing that the company behind my tool will be there to continue to update that tool for the future. TextMate, sadly, seems to be all but abandoned right now with no real updates as to the status of TextMate 2 for some time.

There is one thing I am missing at the moment, and that is Command-T, or Go To File. I was hoping that PeepOpen would fill that void, but it does not seem to work with BBEdit at the moment. I’m hoping that a future release will fix that issue.

Otherwise, I look forward to really digging into things in the coming weeks and months.

Categories
Technology

Rethinking Backups

Since we moved back to Minnesota, the technology in our house has changed pretty dramatically. From a Mac mini tied to a single desk we now have two Apple portables around the house. The 2.26Ghz MacBook my wife uses stays in the house and moves around quite often while the 2.7Ghz Core i7 13″ MacBook Pro I have goes from home to work every day.

Because of the extreme mobility we now have, I now need to rethink my backup solutions to something a little more flexible and more regular. Portables inherently are more prone to failure due to the portability of the device (moving around is never good for a computer).

Right now here is what I am thinking.

USB External HDDs

The MacBook carries a 250GB hard disk and the MacBook Pro carries a 500GB disk. The idea is to get an external drive for each matching the size that can be used for a bootable clone. That clone would be updated weekly (hopefully) and there just in case the whole drive would die and I would need to get something off easily.

I’m not going to get tricky with it, just pick up some generic external disks from Western Digital so that I have a relatively decent warranty that I can use if things go “belly up”.

Time Capsule

This is the big change for me. I didn’t think I would ever think about using a Time Capsule, but with Laura now having a laptop upstairs and the rest of the technology in the house being in the basement, I think it is time to finally put one in place to fix two issues:

  1. wireless backups through Time Machine
  2. wireless coverage in the house

That sounds like a good deal to me. The 2TB version should be more than enough to act as the main “always there” backup device for the house along with any extra storage I might need for larger files.

Between the two of them I’m fairly confident that stuff will be “safe”. Of course, those are the words of a dead man right there, but that’s what it looks like I am going to go with soon.

First, though, is that I need to actually get the money for this stuff. Until then I continue my Time Machine backups every week.

Apple’s “Other” Releases

Today Apple released the newest version of their operating system for person computers: Mac OS X Lion. That’s not really news because that has been anticipated for a while.

However, that was not all that they released. Along with Lion Apple announced new MacBook Airs, Mac minis, and Thunderbolt Displays. I’ll just briefly touch on each.

MacBook Air

What was great is now even better. The revision brings Intel Core processors to the entire line, a Thunderbolt port, a bump in RAM for some configurations, a backlit keyboard and forces in Intel HD graphics. The design stays the same and really nothing else has changed, but the performance increase is both welcome and wonderful.

Sandy Bridge (Intel chipset) has been a great asset for all manufacturers. Now the MacBook Air gets to take it for a spin as well.

The update to the MacBook Air also ushers in the end of the MacBook line, for now. No longer can you get a white polycarbonate MacBook from Apple and the 11″ MacBook Air has taken its place at the $999 price point. For the moment if you want a 13″ Mac portable with an optical drive you are looking at the 13″ MacBook Pro or an external drive for the 13″ MacBook Air.

Who knows it that’s a great idea or not, but it is a simplifying of the whole lineup back to only two lines of portables.

Mac mini

Yes, that is how they spell it, with the lower-case “m” currently. The Mac mini receives many of the updates that the MacBook Air did and also loses its optical drive.

One cool thing is the possibility of upgrading the Mac mini to a dual-core Core i7 processor and AMD Radeon HD graphics. That’s the first time the Mac mini has had discreet graphics since the PowerPC days. Sadly, the quad-core Core i7 is only available on the Mac mini with Lion Server, but with no option for the AMD Radeon HD graphics. It makes sense in a way, but still disappointing because it would be nice to get the quad-core processor with the AMD Radeon HD graphics chip.

However, the dual-core Core i7 is clocked higher, so in games the performance might actually be better. Benchmarks will bear that out in some way.

Not much else new. I still really like the Mac mini and would consider getting one as a dedicated machine for at home. More interesting is its use as a Mac server. Maybe one day.

Thunderbolt Displays

I didn’t pay attention to any rumors about new displays because I wasn’t sure what they could do with it. However, what Apple did was kind of cool.

Now you hook up your Apple Thunderbolt Display to a Thunderbolt port on a Mac and it not only handles video but also USB, Firewire, and Ethernet. It also acts as a Thunderbolt host so that you can daisy-chain more Thunderbolt devices. So you hook up one cable and get all of that. The new Thunderbolt Display is nothing less than a Mac docking station! Awesome.

I am guessing you will see a lot of these on desks around the world soon. The newest MacBook Pros (15″ and 17″ models) can also chain together two of these displays and display across both of them. That’s pretty cool.

Finally we see why Apple pushed Thunderbolt so hard. It probably isn’t going to supplant USB 3.0 in the next round, but that 10Gbps pipe allows this sort of one-cable-to-many solutions that otherwise I don’t think would exist. That’s pretty cool and pretty powerful.

The idea of getting rid of a USB hub and power brick and having a Thunderbolt Display on my desk that I hook up to when I get there is pretty compelling. Now if they created a 24″ version for around $500, that I might be able to swing.

Conclusion

Overall, some fairly basic updates (and expected) and (finally) a good use for Thunderbolt. Couple that with Mac OS X Lion and Xcode 4.1 and you have a pretty good release day for the company in Cupertino.

The BBEdit Trial

TextMate has been my editor-of-choice since I purchased my first Mac back in 2005. I’ve tried going to Vim, gedit, and some others … but I keep coming back to TextMate.

One I have never really given a fair shake has been BBEdit. Looking back, it is both surprising and unsurprising that I have not done so. First of all, BBEdit was expensive at $100 for a license. Couple that with the fact that it is “old” in the sense that BBEdit has been on the Mac “forever” and I was just not that interested.

Being “old” is something I might have taken into consideration sooner, but with the seeming “death” of TextMate at the moment, the age of BBEdit is one of its greatest strengths. Bare Bones Software has proven loyal to both the program and their customers. Because of that, BBEdit has just hit version 10 and they halved the price to $50 for a license (lower than TextMate’s $58 at the moment).

Hitting version 10 is pretty awesome. Originally released in 1991, I think it is pretty awesome that 20 years later a company is still working on their product and pushing it ahead. That’s a far cry from the seeming “death” of TextMate after only a handful of years in comparison.

So I have the 30-day trial on my machine and it has replaced TextMate on my dock. We will see how the next little while goes and then I will report back with my findings.