wozwoz

Power demands are ridiculous. Fan demands are ridiculous. And with 3 huge fans, this will be noisy too (I look forward to seeing those specs - don't trust the comment about putting it under your desk, and then it is quiet). Most of the speed improvements seem to be coming from increasing the number of cores to 28 ... which is fine if your problem breaks down nicely into parallel chunks ... but many problems don't, and for those we just need simple raw power increase ... not shown in the examples. I do like the dual 10G Ethernet - that will be everywhere soon enough.

Anyone who sticks a Bluetooth radiating device INTO their head ... needs their head examined. Well done to Yahoo for pointing out the obvious. 

My Macbook Air Retina arrived today. It is very elegant and beautifully designed, more compact, and noticeably faster than my previous 2014 Macbook Air. That is the upside. On the downside, I mention 3 down factors compared to the older Macbook Air:

1. The new Retina model no longer has an illuminated Apple logo on the lid - I miss that.

2. No more MagSafe connector: that is a minus:  MagSafe is wonderful, easy to connect, and I liked the the little green or orange light that showed you when it was charging or full. That is all gone.

3. Crappy adaptors or no adaptors:  
For the old Macbook Air, Apple sold an excellent Thunderbolt to Ethernet adaptor. That no longer works with the new Macbook Air, because the new MacBook Air does not accept Thunderbolt (unless you double dongle) ... and Apple does NOT make a Thunderbolt 3 to Ethernet adaptor (which is ridiculous). So, instead, I purchased from the Apple store the Belkin USB-C (not Thunderbolt 3) to Ethernet adaptor ... even though it gets an appalling rating on the Apple store (most users give it 1 out of 5 stars). I have measured the performance with the Belkin adaptor, and in every test, the Belkin USB-C adaptor has been slower on the new Mac than using Apple's old Thunderbolt to ethernet adaptor on the old Mac - an appalling outcome. That is going backwards ... not going forwards. 

Apple needs to wake up and start making a Thunderbolt 3 to Ethernet adaptor (and a Thunderbolt 3 to HDMI adaptor). In the meantime, I will have to now go buy a Thunderbolt 3 dock.

I may not like PCs (well, Windows), but even I would have to admit that moving from a PC to an iPad is not an upgrade. They are totally different things. As Tim Cook appears to advocate, an iPad is not a 'computer' - I could not possibly imagine doing my research work on it, or running Mathematica on it, or writing a serious paper on it.

I have noticed that iPads are very popular with 5 to 10 year olds:  the parents give it to them to shut the kids up, and they doodle away with it on the couch (instead of sitting in front of the idiot box).

What kind of computer company puts out an advert: "Hey mom, what's a computer?"
One that doesn't make computers anymore?