“Among the suprises in Apple’s WWDC Mac announcements — besides the fact that the MacBook Air lives on — was that the 12-inch Apple MacBook and the 13-inch MacBook Pro now start at $1,299 in their respective base configurations,” Joel Santo Domingo writes for PC Magazine. “With a price difference eliminated and a Kaby Lake update, both are attractive options, but which laptop is the better buy for you?”
“The 12-inch MacBook is Apple’s thinnest laptop, measuring 0.52 by 11.04 by 7.74 inches (HWD), and weighing 2.03 pounds,” Santo Domingo writes. “The 13-inch MacBook Pro is a bit larger, at 0.59 by 11.97 by 8.36 inches and 3.02 pounds.”
“Both come with 8GB of RAM (configurable up to 16GB), but they differ on storage. The MacBook comes with a 256GB SSD, while the MacBook Pro comes with half that,” Santo Domingo writes. “Both systems have bright and clear IPS screens, but the 13-inch MacBook Pro has an advantage in screen size, resolution (2,560 by 1,600 versus 2,304 by 1,440), brightness (500 nits versus 300 nits), and DCI-P3 color gamut (the 12-inch MacBook has standard sRGB color).”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: For us, for our road machines, we want the smallest, lightest possible solution, so our choice is actually between the MacBook and now, with iOS 11’s Multi-Touch Drag and Drop and Files app, the 10.5-inch iPad Pro. Or maybe we should give up a bit of weight and size savings in exchange for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro? Decisions, decisions, decisions! Thanks to Apple’s excellent work on iOS 11, we now have many more options!
Blows my mind why Apple insist on only ONE port.
Two should be the minimum.
I’m sure you have a real need for those ports, but no matter how many Macs I see in all sorts of different places, I never saw ANY of them hooked up to more than one single thing (most commonly, a USB flash drive, or an iPhone).
Apple doesn’t do things before it carefully reviews the needs of its customers, and if more than 95% of them don’t use a feature, that feature is gone from the next version of the device. Last two decades are packed with examples:
SCSI
Analogue audio/video input (for video capturing)
Floppy drive
Analogue modem
Front Row remote (and Front Row app)
Firewire port
PC-Card slot
Express Card slot
Optical drive
ADC output
DVI output
Mini-DVI output
audio input
I’m sure there are many more, this is just what I could think of in a minute. Apple’s thinking has been fairly consistent here. If ports are there, and practically nobody ever uses them, then they are a waste of everyone’s money (and Apple’s effort).
ABSTRACT: A Girl in Every Port: An Analysis of Gender-specific Choices in Consumer Technology, Technoneurosis Today, Vol. 0
In psychoanalytic terms, the young-male-geek obsession with expansion ports is symptomatic of a repressed desire for sexual experimentation, to “hook up,” to “plug and play,” to wield “dongles” with impunity. Nominally creative expression is identified with physical penetration (joining male connectors with female ports, often embedded in “laptops” of “sexy” design) followed by infusion of data (analogous to insemination). A related disorder is the deeper “hands-on” fascination with expansion slots.
This fixation with certain hardware explains, in part, the geekish fury at Apple, Inc. for removing a number of ports and thus reducing opportunities for promiscuous coupling. This fury is closely related to the general longing, in software, for “open” systems (where “anything goes,” wink, nudge), along with its complementary disdain for Apple’s “walled garden” (symbolising the innocence of Eden, before Eve blew the doors off.)
That was deliciously funny! I can always count on your writing to tickle the grey cells, one way or the other!
Predrag, I don’t find being able to charge my laptop and having an external drive hooked up at the same time unreasonable.
Neither do I. It makes complete sense, from that perspective.
My guess is that Apple did some research to figure out how many people are actually doing exactly that, and the result probably fell below their threshold, which meant that the extra port had to go.
So, those of us who do it are stuck with dongles (for the duration of that charging).
My guess is that there was a bit of two things: a long term plan for the iPad to be THE low end computing device: and a period where designers overruling the engineers, with the result the MacBook was thoroughly Ived. The iPad has only one port, so surely a low end laptop should too? It’s a miracle it wasn’t a lightning port.
Of course the vision wasn’t to be, or at least it didn’t turn out that way. Apple seems to have gone through a trough of Mac and iPad products that don’t quite meet market requirements, which it is only now starting to dig its way out of. I really expect the next version of the MacBook to have an additional port, and a massive drop in price, just like the original MBA problems were fixed back in the day.
MacBook is a great choice. I’ve got the “old” version with m5-processor. It is a real computer, even Indesign runs at quite good speed. Everything else like Mail and Safari runs extremely well. As much as I love my iPad Pro 12,9 inch, it’s not a full replacement for a real computer.
By the time you configure either one to anything usable, your wallet is going to be mighty thin. But I like PB&J, so here goes.
With iOS 11, Apple has taken a giant step to making the iPad Pro line a viable laptop replacement (12.9,256GB,$899). Now add a smart cover ($169) and a pencil ($99) you are paying $1167. It is in the same price range as the two laptops. Hmmmm. Very interesting given the (soon to be) capabilities of the iPad.
I need to buy my daughter a computer for college. Now the waters are really muddied.
The main advantage of iPads over Macs for most consumers has been price, half or less. It couldn’t do everything you wanted but it was good enough for 90% of it. Going for a true laptop replacement though does muddy the waters. Even if the iPad can basically do 100% of what I can do on a Mac (and even unique things that the pencil offers), it’s still slower and clunkier, the trackpad+physical keyboard is simply a faster, more precise and IMHO, more elegant input method.
I will say that the Mac-OS-ification of iOS was welcome for a change in the addition of the file system, dock and drag and drop. I could almost see Mac OS appearing on the iPad. It’s probably the long-term vision, but still not quite there.
Get your daughter a MacBook Pro. She will thank you later. The portability of an iPad is vastly overrated and she has no idea how her computing needs may grow. In some fields of study, she may actually be installing Linux or Windows to do new things. Don’t confine her with a consumer grade machine now.
It really does depend on what she is studying and the college systems. One fact to consider is note taking, something she will be doing a lot of every day. The iPad Pro with Pencil is like writing on paper. It is faster and quieter in a lecture. The iPad will be easier to use if she is in a class, meeting, or study group that is not meeting at a table or desk (This can happen a lot) . If she is doing more art, language, or outdoor courses the iPad will be better. If she is in more math and science classes MacBook. Business could be a toss up. You should see if the school or certain classes have required software. Also consider a cell/GPS upgrade for the iPad. It will up the price, but may be a godsend one day. If she looses it or it’s stolen she can quickly find it and lock it. These are very real possibilities in college. If her phone is broken, lost, or stolen it will give her a backup. It can increase her safety. This is something the MacBook does not offer.
It really does depend on what she is studying and the college systems. One fact to consider is note taking, something she will be doing a lot of every day. The iPad Pro with Pencil is like writing on paper. It is faster and quieter in a lecture. The iPad will be easier to use if she is in a class, meeting, or study group that is not meeting at a table or desk (This can happen a lot) . If she is doing more art, language, or outdoor courses the iPad will be better. If she is in more math and science classes MacBook. Business could be a toss up. You should see if the school or certain classes have required software. Also consider a cell/GPS upgrade for the iPad. It will up the price, but may be a godsend one day. If she looses it or it’s stolen she can quickly find it and lock it. These are very real possibilities in college. If her phone is broken, lost, or stolen it will give her a backup. It can increase her safety. This is something the MacBook does not offer.
This was supposed to be a reply to Paul B.