The new MacBook will be fanless, but you will be expected to pick it up often and whiff it back and forth in the air to keep it cool. A new app will keep a record of your effort and calculate how many calories you've expended. This will be advertised as a new feature and people will flock to buy them.
People (for certain values of "people") whine about the "Apple Tax™"—but the real anchor tied around the industry's neck is the Intel Tax. The prices of their processors are highway robbery.
If it were possible to use an ARM processor instead of Intel (I have no opinion on its feasibility), that would be a great thing. Probably it will take a generation or two more before that's possible.
In the meantime: Adding an ARM processor like the A7 to a laptop would (proportionally) add almost nothing to the cost—could it be used to handle a lot of the housekeeping chores that CPU cycles are currently wasted on? Then the ARM processors could progressively take over more and more functions until the Intel chip could be done away with—some years down the road.
iPhones and iPads ARM SOCs have the fastest GPUs around with power to spare. (Imagination Technologies Power VR)
<span style="line-height:1.4em;">This device will most certainly not use Intel Chips.</span>
<span style="line-height:1.4em;">It will use ARM CPU and Power VR GPU and Flash for storage.</span>
The keyboard and trackpad will be context sensitive on a sapphire glass slab. It will run iOS with a modern laptop UI that borrows heavily from the iPad Air iOS 7 paradigm. It will be 64 bit and super efficient and iCloud integrated. It will run iOS applications that exist today.
That sure would be a useless machine for those of us who use BootCamp!
I would never buy a computer with no ability to efficiently run the code that currently works on my MBA (all x86 software).
Yes, it was a from a liquid cool G5. Otherwise it wouldn't have the radiator looking heatsink. The liquid cooling was just to assist in cooling since the fans weren't adequate to do the entire job. Like I said, the true last fanless Mac was the PowerMac G4 Cube. That PowerMac G5 also has fans elsewhere anyways like all the other PowerMac G5's.
Try highlighting a sentence...you can only do it with press-down-click then drag your finger to highlight. If you double tap to click, it only highlights one word.
Don't do it Apple, you will make a lot of people really angry!
??? No "press-down-click then drag" to highlight required at all. (Not even on this idiot PC laptop I'm stuck with right now, and its trackpad and related drivers are barely ready for prime time.)
Use "tap-and-a-half"; Tap twice, but don't let your finger lift from the trackpad on the second tap, then drag your finger to the end of the section you want highlight. For that matter, "tap-and-a-half" has worked on Apple mice since long before the first trackpads showed up.
Try highlighting a sentence...you can only do it with press-down-click then drag your finger to highlight. If you double tap to click, it only highlights one word.
Don't do it Apple, you will make a lot of people really angry!
You're showing your lack of a clue...pretty heavily.
I highlight plenty of sentences every day. I never click the track pad. Ever. Magic.
Seriously who uses the press-down-anywhere to click?
Everyone who wants to actually select an item, since tap click doesn’t work 1:1 with mechanical click. I don’t mechanical right-click ever, but that’s because of multitouch. It’s great.
Originally Posted by Seankill
Especially on windows 7.
Particularly since it DOESN’T WORK AT ALL unless you do mechanical.
Originally Posted by waybacmac
Forget the 12" iPad. There is no usage model that makes any sense…
So no one would ever want a tablet in the same category as a laptop, huh.
Originally Posted by pmz
Just false. It is the mechanical click that is limiting and more difficult.
Just false.
There is a 3 finger drag for that, which is literally the easiest drag in the world...
Except for, you know, one finger drag, which we mechanical users use. Never mind how much less precise that is.
Originally Posted by pmz
I highlight plenty of sentences every day. I never click the track pad. Ever. Magic.
If the next MBA is an Intel powered, and I assume it will be, for it to not have a fan I will assume for more intense processing for both CPU and GPU (Apple Aperture for me) will come with a performance cap to keep the heat away. My current Haswell MBA will run the fans while editing on the go in Aperture, especially if I am exporting and editing.
This would mean that at a certain point, it would just throttle the processing to a point and no more, maybe even backing it down. Should be interesting to see how that stacks up against current MBA's.
People (for certain values of "people") whine about the "Apple Tax™"—but the real anchor tied around the industry's neck is the Intel Tax. The prices of their processors are highway robbery.
If it were possible to use an ARM processor instead of Intel (I have no opinion on its feasibility), that would be a great thing. Probably it will take a generation or two more before that's possible.
In the meantime: Adding an ARM processor like the A7 to a laptop would (proportionally) add almost nothing to the cost—could it be used to handle a lot of the housekeeping chores that CPU cycles are currently wasted on? Then the ARM processors could progressively take over more and more functions until the Intel chip could be done away with—some years down the road.
Highway robbery? Probably not. Each time Intel decreases the size of the process (i.e. 90 nm to 60 nm), the cost rises.
The fanless designs might be restricting it below the maximum power but a small fan could be enough to keep it higher power:
[VIDEO]
A few people say they get on just fine with 6 or 7 year old hardware so 4 year old hardware should suffice for them. The biggest problem is getting the heat away from the CPU so a piezo fan can sit right next to it and blow over the top, spreading the heat out further.
Maybe Intel should put tiny low power piezo fans inside the CPU itself and force airflow between individual cores.
What I'm getting at is not the fan you show in the video, but a cluster of coin sized piezoelectric fans throughout the laptop chassis, one focused on each component that needs heat dissipation. And perhaps another near an air inlet and another near an air outlet. Controlled by firmware these could cycle on/off in various patterns to create the necessary airflow to cool based upon the type of work the machine is doing, and with discrete control over each in a cluster of these fans the firmware could optimize power conservation.
Try highlighting a sentence...you can only do it with press-down-click then drag your finger to highlight. If you double tap to click, it only highlights one word.
Don't do it Apple, you will make a lot of people really angry!
When the multitouch trackpad came out in 2008 on MacBook Air, the way to highlight a sentence and to drag an object was a double tap with hold after the second tap with dragging without letting go after the second tap-and-hold. A couple years layer, Apple came out with a three-finger tap and drag for that purpose. When they did, they obsoleted the double-tap-hold-and-drag method. It can still be enabled, but it's not listed as a gesture in the Trackpad preference pane anymore; instead, it's in the accessibility preference pane.
My first Mac was a 2008 MacBook Air, followed by a 2008 unibody aluminum MacBook 13", followed by a 2009 unibody aluminum MacBook Pro 15". Therefore, I learned my drag using the double-tap-hold-and-drag method. I think the three-finger-tap-and-drag was first introduced in Lion. When I upgraded, I lost my favorite way to do dragging, and I spent some time trying to figure out why it didn't work anymore. Then I found it in the Accessibility preference pane. I tried the three-finger-tap-and-drag method, but didn't like it.
I have seen people who used Macs before 2008 click on the trackpad with one hand and while holding down the trackpad, use the other hand to drag. It looks really strange and outdated to me. I'm sure those who started using Macs with Lion, prefer the three-finger-tap-and-drag method, and consider the double-tap-hold-and-drag method as weird and outdated too.
Ding ding ding! I believe you nailed it -- except the 13" MBP is here to stay; see below.
Since the price difference between the 11" and 13" MBA is only $100, it's really hard to justify going with the 11" on portability alone -- and paying for that portability with its small display. Could as well have priced it at $100 more than the 13", since price really doesn't play any role in the decision for the 11"; at least for me. It sort of is a Pro device; for those who need a full-size keyboard-equipped Mac with them at all times.
And the 13" is basically redundant. Anyone getting a 13" MBA today either hasn't done their homework comparing it to the 13" MBP; or is an idiot for skimping on the upgrades necessary to still be able to enjoy it a year or two down the road:
The only scenario where the 13" MBA is actually cheaper than the 13" MBP is when you're looking at the respective base models. But then you're stuck with 4 GB of RAM and a 1.3 GHz CPU; the 128 GB SSD might in fact be sufficient for many, as there's always external storage (but even that only really works when you're at your desk). Once you bring the specs up to 8 GB of RAM, which at $100 is a no-brainer, and the very reasonably-priced $150 CPU upgrade, you're already looking at $1349; and if you add to that the 256 GB SSD you're at $1549 -- $50 more than a 13" MBP with 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB SSD and a much faster CPU. Plus you're getting a retina display, and even a smaller footprint than the MBA's -- at the cost of a somewhat shorter battery life, and less than 18% more weight.
So if Apple were to consolidate the two into one 12" MBA, and reduce the bezel a little, that could be a very nice replacement for the 11"; preferably at the same $999. And for whom that is too small, there's the 13" MBP starting at $1299 (I had to check -- prices on retina MBPs really have come down!); soon to take the classic MBP's $1199 price point. So there really is no need for a 13" MBA, is there.
I bet the name will return; quite possibly with this very sensible 12" notebook. One model, which surely will become the top-selling Mac (that the MBA is now), one name. The 'Air' has been around for 6 years now (it's been six years already? WTF?!), so it sure would be time for something new. Or in this case old. Well, different.
december, I think you are on to something. We've all been waiting to see Apple intro a Retina MBA. It makes sense they would consolidate to an in between screen size of 12" rather than develop two separate Retina models at the low end of the Mac lineup. So it's to be a 12" MBA with Retina display and an intelligent cluster of slim, efficient, nearly silent, and reliable piezoelectric fans for component cooling. And something different about the trackpad (I haven't got that quite sorted yet).
I remember reading about an apple patent related to the use of ionized air electrict, and magnetic fields to creat an air current without the need of fan... maybe they have perfected that technology and it is ready for deployment,
See message #17 where I hypothesize that Apple incorporate piezoelectric fans. GE seems to have perfected this and exactly for the purpose of replacing rotating fans in computers. A piezoelectric fan is nearly silent, uses half the energy and is more reliable. A cluster of such fans, each about the size of a quarter could be controlled by firmware to optimize airflow where needed according to the specific task the computer is performing, which would further increase energy conservation.
No need for all this theorizing about Haswell processors that don't need cooling or using the ARM-based processor from the iOS kit. Occam's Razor, folks!
In the new Mac Pro they didn't have separate heat sinks and fans for each chip, but a central heat sink that everything just pressed against. With something as thin as the Macbook Air, I wonder if they would use the case as the heatsink, and have the CPU literally pressed up against it?
What is this craziness about drag? Read my post, two up.
And read my post.
You can't possibly use other multi-touch gestures with the 3-finger drag and it's awkward as heck to do it on a MacBook form factor. With the mechanical button, you can click with your thumb and freely move the cursor anywhere with the index finger and perform the 4-swipe Mission Control, so you can sweep to your desktop, click and hold a file, Mission Control to Skype or something, and drag it to there; you can't do that with the 3-finger drag.
Besides, I use BetterTouchTool to have 3-finger swipe up to go to the top of a page and 3-finger swipe down to go to the bottom of a page. So the 3-finger drag would fail or some other crazy thing would happen.
My Trackpad cursor speed is set such that I can move the cursor across the whole screen in a 1.5-inch circular area. The 3-finger drag is just awkward to do.
I just turned it on, and yeah it's awkward as heck since you have to drag your 3 fingers across the whole trackpad versus just 1. I also use 3-finger swipe left/right to go back/forward (quick swipe, so it's not awkward to do at all), so the 3-finger drag destroys that function.
Also, you can't rapidly click links without a mechanical button, just like a mouse.
You can say the same thing for a virtual keyboard vs physical keyboard. Sure, you can get things done, but the mechanical keyboard offers far more efficiency and functions. I use the best of both worlds with the current mechanical Trackpads and custom gestures and my workflow would be obliterated if I lost the function of the mechanical click. I use the drag-Mission Control-drop thing all the time, as with rapid clicking of links, and just having a convenient point-click, point-click, point-click mechanical/touch workflow instead of point, let go of trackpad, tap, point, let go of trackpad, tap, point, let go of trackpad, tap. It's just really slow.
And yes, I do game with the Trackpad. I'm actually worse when playing with a mouse. You can't play first-person shooter games without a mechanical click, period. Speed is key with FPS games, and a tap is not going to work out, let along having rhythmic shots with specific timing (tapping has a delay).
Didn't we see Apple patents within the last couple years that allow for fan-less heat dispersal via the keyboard? I don't think it was piezoelectric but rather some passive concept.
edit: The last one on the list is probably what I'm remembering.
Didn't we see Apple patents within the last couple years that allow for fan-less heat dispersal via the keyboard? I don't think it was piezoelectric but rather some passive concept.
I hope that's not it, the keyboard on the MBP already gets uncomfortably hot when gaming.
Comments
If it were possible to use an ARM processor instead of Intel (I have no opinion on its feasibility), that would be a great thing. Probably it will take a generation or two more before that's possible.
In the meantime: Adding an ARM processor like the A7 to a laptop would (proportionally) add almost nothing to the cost—could it be used to handle a lot of the housekeeping chores that CPU cycles are currently wasted on? Then the ARM processors could progressively take over more and more functions until the Intel chip could be done away with—some years down the road.
I don't think that was totally fanless...
Interestingly, the diagram below doesn't show them - is the picture above from liquid-cooled models?
http://appleinsider.com/article/?id=508
I would never buy a computer with no ability to efficiently run the code that currently works on my MBA (all x86 software).
Originally Posted by brlawyer
Don't forget the 2004 G5 with liquid cooling...
Which serious fannage to help the liquid cooling part of heat management work properly.
Remember commentary by early users of sound levels with all fans going under load?
Interestingly, the diagram below doesn't show them - is the picture above from liquid-cooled models?
http://appleinsider.com/article/?id=508
Yes, it was a from a liquid cool G5. Otherwise it wouldn't have the radiator looking heatsink. The liquid cooling was just to assist in cooling since the fans weren't adequate to do the entire job. Like I said, the true last fanless Mac was the PowerMac G4 Cube. That PowerMac G5 also has fans elsewhere anyways like all the other PowerMac G5's.
Try highlighting a sentence...you can only do it with press-down-click then drag your finger to highlight. If you double tap to click, it only highlights one word.
Don't do it Apple, you will make a lot of people really angry!
??? No "press-down-click then drag" to highlight required at all. (Not even on this idiot PC laptop I'm stuck with right now, and its trackpad and related drivers are barely ready for prime time.)
Use "tap-and-a-half"; Tap twice, but don't let your finger lift from the trackpad on the second tap, then drag your finger to the end of the section you want highlight. For that matter, "tap-and-a-half" has worked on Apple mice since long before the first trackpads showed up.
Try highlighting a sentence...you can only do it with press-down-click then drag your finger to highlight. If you double tap to click, it only highlights one word.
Don't do it Apple, you will make a lot of people really angry!
You're showing your lack of a clue...pretty heavily.
I highlight plenty of sentences every day. I never click the track pad. Ever. Magic.
Everyone who wants to actually select an item, since tap click doesn’t work 1:1 with mechanical click. I don’t mechanical right-click ever, but that’s because of multitouch. It’s great.
Particularly since it DOESN’T WORK AT ALL unless you do mechanical.
So no one would ever want a tablet in the same category as a laptop, huh.
Just false.
Except for, you know, one finger drag, which we mechanical users use. Never mind how much less precise that is.
And there again, 3-finger drag is less precise.
If the next MBA is an Intel powered, and I assume it will be, for it to not have a fan I will assume for more intense processing for both CPU and GPU (Apple Aperture for me) will come with a performance cap to keep the heat away. My current Haswell MBA will run the fans while editing on the go in Aperture, especially if I am exporting and editing.
This would mean that at a certain point, it would just throttle the processing to a point and no more, maybe even backing it down. Should be interesting to see how that stacks up against current MBA's.
People (for certain values of "people") whine about the "Apple Tax™"—but the real anchor tied around the industry's neck is the Intel Tax. The prices of their processors are highway robbery.
If it were possible to use an ARM processor instead of Intel (I have no opinion on its feasibility), that would be a great thing. Probably it will take a generation or two more before that's possible.
In the meantime: Adding an ARM processor like the A7 to a laptop would (proportionally) add almost nothing to the cost—could it be used to handle a lot of the housekeeping chores that CPU cycles are currently wasted on? Then the ARM processors could progressively take over more and more functions until the Intel chip could be done away with—some years down the road.
Highway robbery? Probably not. Each time Intel decreases the size of the process (i.e. 90 nm to 60 nm), the cost rises.
So no one would ever want a tablet in the same category as a laptop, huh.
Nope.
What I'm getting at is not the fan you show in the video, but a cluster of coin sized piezoelectric fans throughout the laptop chassis, one focused on each component that needs heat dissipation. And perhaps another near an air inlet and another near an air outlet. Controlled by firmware these could cycle on/off in various patterns to create the necessary airflow to cool based upon the type of work the machine is doing, and with discrete control over each in a cluster of these fans the firmware could optimize power conservation.
My first Mac was a 2008 MacBook Air, followed by a 2008 unibody aluminum MacBook 13", followed by a 2009 unibody aluminum MacBook Pro 15". Therefore, I learned my drag using the double-tap-hold-and-drag method. I think the three-finger-tap-and-drag was first introduced in Lion. When I upgraded, I lost my favorite way to do dragging, and I spent some time trying to figure out why it didn't work anymore. Then I found it in the Accessibility preference pane. I tried the three-finger-tap-and-drag method, but didn't like it.
I have seen people who used Macs before 2008 click on the trackpad with one hand and while holding down the trackpad, use the other hand to drag. It looks really strange and outdated to me. I'm sure those who started using Macs with Lion, prefer the three-finger-tap-and-drag method, and consider the double-tap-hold-and-drag method as weird and outdated too.
december, I think you are on to something. We've all been waiting to see Apple intro a Retina MBA. It makes sense they would consolidate to an in between screen size of 12" rather than develop two separate Retina models at the low end of the Mac lineup. So it's to be a 12" MBA with Retina display and an intelligent cluster of slim, efficient, nearly silent, and reliable piezoelectric fans for component cooling. And something different about the trackpad (I haven't got that quite sorted yet).
See message #17 where I hypothesize that Apple incorporate piezoelectric fans. GE seems to have perfected this and exactly for the purpose of replacing rotating fans in computers. A piezoelectric fan is nearly silent, uses half the energy and is more reliable. A cluster of such fans, each about the size of a quarter could be controlled by firmware to optimize airflow where needed according to the specific task the computer is performing, which would further increase energy conservation.
No need for all this theorizing about Haswell processors that don't need cooling or using the ARM-based processor from the iOS kit. Occam's Razor, folks!
In the new Mac Pro they didn't have separate heat sinks and fans for each chip, but a central heat sink that everything just pressed against. With something as thin as the Macbook Air, I wonder if they would use the case as the heatsink, and have the CPU literally pressed up against it?
What is this craziness about drag? Read my post, two up.
And read my post.
You can't possibly use other multi-touch gestures with the 3-finger drag and it's awkward as heck to do it on a MacBook form factor. With the mechanical button, you can click with your thumb and freely move the cursor anywhere with the index finger and perform the 4-swipe Mission Control, so you can sweep to your desktop, click and hold a file, Mission Control to Skype or something, and drag it to there; you can't do that with the 3-finger drag.
Besides, I use BetterTouchTool to have 3-finger swipe up to go to the top of a page and 3-finger swipe down to go to the bottom of a page. So the 3-finger drag would fail or some other crazy thing would happen.
My Trackpad cursor speed is set such that I can move the cursor across the whole screen in a 1.5-inch circular area. The 3-finger drag is just awkward to do.
I just turned it on, and yeah it's awkward as heck since you have to drag your 3 fingers across the whole trackpad versus just 1. I also use 3-finger swipe left/right to go back/forward (quick swipe, so it's not awkward to do at all), so the 3-finger drag destroys that function.
Also, you can't rapidly click links without a mechanical button, just like a mouse.
You can say the same thing for a virtual keyboard vs physical keyboard. Sure, you can get things done, but the mechanical keyboard offers far more efficiency and functions. I use the best of both worlds with the current mechanical Trackpads and custom gestures and my workflow would be obliterated if I lost the function of the mechanical click. I use the drag-Mission Control-drop thing all the time, as with rapid clicking of links, and just having a convenient point-click, point-click, point-click mechanical/touch workflow instead of point, let go of trackpad, tap, point, let go of trackpad, tap, point, let go of trackpad, tap. It's just really slow.
And yes, I do game with the Trackpad. I'm actually worse when playing with a mouse. You can't play first-person shooter games without a mechanical click, period. Speed is key with FPS games, and a tap is not going to work out, let along having rhythmic shots with specific timing (tapping has a delay).
edit: The last one on the list is probably what I'm remembering.
[LIST]
[*] http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/03/04/apple_looking_to_improve_cooling_efficiency_in_future_macs
[/LIST]
Didn't we see Apple patents within the last couple years that allow for fan-less heat dispersal via the keyboard? I don't think it was piezoelectric but rather some passive concept.
I hope that's not it, the keyboard on the MBP already gets uncomfortably hot when gaming.