Way too expensive… imagine paying that much for something that could get stolen!!
Yeah! Like my planet!
One more reply: The keyboard is a complete redesign and isn’t available yet, so maybe your reports are of the old keyboard? I have always found Apple keys to be a very pleasant experience compared to a normal PC keyboard, but since I regularly need to replace mine 'cuz the cat chews the cable I use a cheap keyboard and suffer.
The presentation made it look pretty cool. It could be motivated by the very thin nature of the thing though. The main point seemed to be that the travel is always parallel to the base, not tilty. This is not something that has ever bugged me. What I would like to see is a keyboard that can be immersed in coffee and still work. This seems a pretty obvious flaw to me . . .
Sounds kind of like the Glyph?
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Well, I am clumsy.
I seem to have some kind of proprioceptive issue. I can’t type with two hands. I can type with one hand, pretty quickly, if the keyboard is small enough. I have to look at it, which affects ergonomics. I can’t grip with a pencil pointing forward. I can grip with a pencil pointing backwards or sideways, nestled under my thumb. I have to have a long-enough pencil, and someplace to rest my hand, which rules out silly short pencils and styli.
I can use Apple trackpads, and I can use two-finger scrolling, but I have to disable tapping and any more complicated gestures.
I can’t use certain other trackpads and touchscreens without them going completely haywire. Remember when Ubuntu certified Alps trackpads without proper drivers for them, and used PS/2 drivers which interpreted the presence of a hand within a couple inches as double click?
So from here the upside of the Apple trackpads doesn’t seem to be “they enable all these fancy gestures,” but “they enable users to disable all these fancy gestures, and just use a touchpad that works.” That said, an external vertical mouse is still very important to me, and wider scrollbars would be pretty useful…
And I get pretty bad rsi. In my good arm and my bad arm, even though I don’t use my bad arm for anything fancy like typing.
Snow Leopard 10.6.8 is also the last one that can run Appleworks and other PowerPC software, so if you are a long-time Mac user, you are likely to have a lot of files you haven’t yet converted, a couple old games you want to replay, etc. that require an old machine running Snow Leopard.
I switched from Mac to Linux due to the fact that Apple discontinued Appleworks and didn’t replace Appleworks drawing. I switched back due to the accessibility trouble I’d had with Toshiba and Sony hardware, and with Ubuntu certifying incompatible hardware, and with Ubuntu trying to force Unity and trying to eliminate scrollbars.
Also Snow Leopard is the latest version that the first generation of Intel machines can run. There are a lot of those still out there and fine for basic use. There is a similar cut off with Lion too.
From Slate
In sum, Apple has found a technically useful loophole in the way we typically grade the shiny yellow rocks. “In addition to using as little gold as possible while maintaining a specific karatage,” the patent states, “a gold metal matrix composite can be formed that has selected aesthetic properties well-suited for providing a favorable user experience.”
do you have a blog or something?
I have a flakey blog that I rarely if ever maintain. Otherwise, I just debate with people around various places online so it forces me to pick apart my own (often flawed) suppositions and dig into further research rabbit holes. I do this in order to either validate my suppositions or negate some of them and be (thankfully) forced to change and (hopefully) evolve my positions. Even people I get into nasty fights with will sometimes get pissed off enough to pull up research for me I had otherwise overlooked if I cattle-prod them long enough.
Otherwise, outside of that, IRL I tend to be in an echo-chamber with like-minded people (which is good to get certain shit done), however, I also like to force myself into situations (sometimes even hostile ones) where people are trying to pick ideas apart and find proverbial chinks in the armor. Even when their intentions are sometimes mere astroturfing or speaking from ignorance induced via cognitive dissonance, etc., it’s nice to be forced to reexamine ideas and at least attempt to keep my own stubbornness in check.
Also, IRL I am sometimes surrounded by people that if they knew my political opinions or otherwise would do everything in their power to fuck my world, so I have to practice a lot of self-censorship at times. But, that’s pretty much our human condition for everyone and what makes the Internet a fantastic relatively pseudo-anonymous place to exchange ideas more freely, in my opinion.
tl;dr No, I don’t really have a blog.
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12-inch smart watch.
Someone called Flavor Flav.
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I agree. I’ve managed to get some work done with Android tablets, but I always come crawling back to my MBP laptop for its chicklet keyboard, higher res screen and to be free from app and OS ecosystem limitations. I’d like to get a Surface, but I’d rather that be running OS X. I’d like to get a MacBook Air and use that as a sort of more portable “tablet”, but they’re really expensive “tablets”. In the meantime, I’ll keep eyeballing craigslist for a used MBA, heh…
I tend to think the gold Apple watch is for people that can brag they lost their expensive watch and don’t care, because…
I’m using a 2007-ish MacBook Pro which seems increasingly slower, so anything might be an improvement, but I wouldn’t mind having a tablet that ran MacOS. I assume this has been (relatively) long ago discussed, rejected and ridiculed.
The keyboard and its new “butterfly” switches don’t feel as good as Apple’s regular keyboard. Key size and spacing are fine, but the key travel and the way the keys feel are both quite different.
(…)
That said, every new keyboard needs some getting used to, and as writers by trade we’re particularly persnickety about the keyboards we like. We had just a few minutes with the Retina MacBook keyboard, and while we don’t think it’s as good as Apple’s regular MacBook Air and Pro keyboard, it’s possible that it will leave a better impression after several days of use.
The Air’s springy, well-spaced keyboard is one of the reasons many people prefer it over rival machines. Indeed, I actually cringed a bit when I first saw the new MacBook’s button layout: The keys here really don’t have much travel.
That’s what I read.
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I was excited when the iPod was released. At the time, I was sitting there with a relatively expensive, crappy mp3 player and saw right away the advantages of the iPod.
This watch? Just doesn’t seem as revolutionary in its approach to me because it’s tethered to an iPhone. If Apple had figured out some revolutionary way to power a tiny watch that was self-sufficient and didn’t require an iPhone in my pocket, I’d be much more enthused about it.
Overall, I’m much more excited about the direction Apple is going with their new, even larger trackpads with Force Touch, pressure sensitive writing, (pressure sensitive photo editing?), etc.
I already use a MacBook Pro’s trackpad to do a lot of stuff in Photoshop (this mockup below, for example, I used my trackpad for all the editing with my fingers) and would love to be able to also use it more like a Wacom tablet on my laptop.
Of course, if Apple did THIS below with the MacBook’s trackpad, I’d shit bricks. See my mockup below:
Hi-res LCD under the trackpad’s glass. Allows one to pinch and zoom either in unison or even the option to do it independently of the Photoshop image you’re editing on your main screen. Utilizes pressure sensitive capabilities with optional stylus or just use your finger. It’s basically a built-in Wacom tablet and trackpad simultaneously.
A photographer’s portable dream studio and great for other things as well including zooming in on spreadsheets, etc. and could even also serve as a little, secondary display for notes, email alerts, notification center, etc., etc. – The options would be endless, really. See another idea below:
Instead of this, we get a watch that’s tethered to an iPhone. I expect bold stuff like I’m showing in my mockups above from a company like Apple. Not this tepid, limited watch.
In other words, what I’m saying is I should replace Tim Cook. Hire me now, Apple. I’ll work for peanuts.
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Could be. But what I keep thinking is that in five years, the solid gold iWatch will be every bit as obsolete as the cheapest plastic model.
Whereas a five year old Rolex or a Breitling will be the full functional equivalent of a new-in-2020 model, and will retain a huge fraction of its original price (sometimes over 100%)
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My Xybernauts are nearly 20 years old, and they laugh at contemporary iDevices, as well as Roleces.
So the new Macbook keyboard isn’t as good as the old Macbook keyboard, which isn’t as good as the old Lenovo Thinkpad NMB keyboard, which isn’t as good as the IBM Thinkpad NMB keyboard. It seems like we’re marching backwards into the future.
That new keyboard looks like it would be horrible to use for more than a few minutes, but I have known that I am not in Apple’s target market for quite a few years now.
That would be sweet.
I’m use a Mac mostly, due to work, but my wife has a Windows 7 laptop for her work. We finally decided, after years of owning only work computers, that it was time to get a “house computer” again.
Even though I had been a Mac guy for years now, I really liked the idea of Metro. I didn’t get all the hate for it. So, after researching for a while, I got a Yoga 2. (A – in retrospect, perhaps unfortunate – compromise between the Surface and something with a proper keyboard.)
Terrible decision. 8.1 really is a pain, and the Yoga 2 itself adds on a whole slew of its own bugs. And had I forgotten all about terrible bloatware since owning a PC? Yes I had. What a pain in the ass. (At least I checked the PC recently and I guess I bought it before the evil Lenovo spyware/security-wrecker was installed on all their machines.)
I’ll hang on to it, and hope that Windows 10 is magically better, but I’m annoyed. I guess really I should install Mint or something instead, but I’ve finally found a professional photo organizer I like, and obviously it doesn’t exist on Unix.
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