A nice option to have. Of course life would be sweeter if Apple just made a no-compromise pro machine to begin with. Screw thin.
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Hands-On: OWC's 'DEC' Adds an SD Card Slot, Ethernet, and USB Type-A Ports to the MacBook Pro
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Too True! Never have companies saw a market for screw replacements bottoms because of poor product planning.
This is a good idea, they need to do some more refining, but great idea to support a problem that shouldn't exist
This actually sounded kind of cool until I read there is no usb-c thunderbolt option.
LOL, if only the technology existed to have a thicker laptop with more connectivity. Nobody's ever thought of this before!
One thing missing from this : a bigger battery. It'd be great if it had a 99wH battery and attached/detached with strong magnets.
One thing missing from this : a bigger battery. It'd be great if it had a 99wH battery and attached/detached with strong magnets.
Gotta say, this looks like it could be a much better solution than most that I've seen. Shame that they cant' figure out a way to make the connection internal, but I'm sure some sort of very tiny USB C external connection can be used to connect the two pieces. Know what would make it perfect? Space for two 2.5" laptop drives. Not enough specifics for now, but it would be great to be able to slap 2 x 2TB standard (or hybrid) HDDs in there and finally have the amount of storage you can now easily add internally to older MacBook Pros.
Lets hope the final model is either a bit slimmer, or has a truly impressive feature list. As is, it just looks too darn big for an apparently minimal feature-set.
Lets hope the final model is either a bit slimmer, or has a truly impressive feature list. As is, it just looks too darn big for an apparently minimal feature-set.
Thanks for the video, but I must nitpick on one thing: nobody here seems to know what "unique" means. Things are not "very" unique or "most" unique, and no mass manufactured item can be "unique." It means ONE of a kind. You could say it has a unique design, sure, but there are no degrees of "unique," so please stop abusing the word -- it just looks like you were sick that day in English class.
This thing is really bad, please don't use it.
It's going to ruin the screw mounts in the laptop and theyre not designed for that much added weight. These guys obviously haven't done much testing and it's a shame they would sell something that will break your laptop over time.
It's going to ruin the screw mounts in the laptop and theyre not designed for that much added weight. These guys obviously haven't done much testing and it's a shame they would sell something that will break your laptop over time.
What would be very cool, and could be marketed for older MBP's is something that attaches to the bottom of the laptop by replacing the bottom panel altogether. Bigger battery, more HDD bays, ports galore. Breathe new life into an ageing machine, use it as a desktop replacement etc.
(ie: the USB-C connection could be internal)
(ie: the USB-C connection could be internal)
hehe.. I like the name...
They call it a Dec, but it looks, and acts like a 'dock'
"For professionals who rely on the MacBook Pro, this latest iteration fell short of expectations. The outcry was so loud, in fact, that Apple slashed prices on its USB-C adapters, a move rarely seen from the company."
I don't think slashing price on the one thing professionals didn't like anyway is gonna help.... But it will help purchasing more of them.
I like Apple... they don't solve the problem, instead they find a better solution
They call it a Dec, but it looks, and acts like a 'dock'
"For professionals who rely on the MacBook Pro, this latest iteration fell short of expectations. The outcry was so loud, in fact, that Apple slashed prices on its USB-C adapters, a move rarely seen from the company."
I don't think slashing price on the one thing professionals didn't like anyway is gonna help.... But it will help purchasing more of them.
I like Apple... they don't solve the problem, instead they find a better solution
Every laptop apple makes right now is a toy - MacOS cant save this mess. Just like hardware cant help iOS become a decent productivity tool. Apple is having a hard time hitting that perfect balance of hardware and software they were so good at.
Hey Ive, you've truly jumped the shark. You've come full circle and are now no better than a first year design student. It really doesn't matter how thin and pretty you make it, if it's not functional, it's a POS that will go in the garbage regardless of how cool you think it is and how pretty you make it. Form will always, always follow function – design 101.
Do you really still design Apple products or just cash in a paycheck?
Do you really still design Apple products or just cash in a paycheck?
I like your post, but I kind of disagree because, after I stopped laughing at the thought of iOS trying to be productive, I realised something. We're talking lap-top, so for a portable workstation the MBP is still a decent kit, though it is becoming more toy-like, what with the touchbar and dongle-heaven. But the competitors also sell either heavy slabs that have too many features and cook off your lap, or similarly thin hardware that dies because Windows is a POS, even after all this time. So no, I think the MBP is still up there for getting decent work done, mainly because MacOS is still able to be a usable desktop OS in contrast to Windows above 7.
I think the real problem with modern tech is the kinds of visionaries that invented the Amiga, or the early Apple UI, or before that the Xerox interface are somehow not in charge anymore. In the Windows sphere, there is still the disjointedness of technologies that makes all the useful things that hardware can do are not being integrated properly, so to be truly productive it's back a mouse and a keyboard. In the Apple sphere it's the same, the only saving grace is that Apple has moved ahead so slowly lately that it hasn't made so many mistakes, but it's making them now.
I should be able to just sit in front of my computer, have it come on when I look at it, and have a document scroll up and down when my eyes reach the bottom of the page, etc. I should be able to wave my hand in front of the screen rather than swipe a touchpad, to move windows or change desktops. I should be able to control the mouse pointer by pointing my finger at the monitor, without wearing a special glove. I should be able to dictate a document onto the page and have it automatically formatted and emailed off, as though I had a secretary doing it for me. It's all doable right now, but instead we get a useless touchbar and lose a bunch of keys.
As someone who bought an external drive the same day as my new Macbook, I like it. Integrated, keeps things together. Lots of people are saying 'just plug in an external drive when you want it' - I want it all the time. I want to configure it as a Fusion drive with the internal drive, for maximum speed and space. I don't feel I can do that with my current external drive, because there's always the chance that it won't be right there when I need to turn on the laptop. Not the case with this. The ports are a bonus; they have space, and the connections. I figure the build quality of the final product will be better (up to OWC's normal standard, which the images of the prototype aren't), and from knowing their product lines they'll probably sell this with a variety of drives: HD, SSD, and likely an empty kit to build you own.
I can see it wouldn't be for everyone, but for me it's exactly what I want.
I can see it wouldn't be for everyone, but for me it's exactly what I want.
The laws of physics beg to disagree. Storing data in the cloud, even if you had gigabit fiber to your home, would still be dog slow compared with a local disk because of the latency factor. And most people don't have even a tenth that speed. If you've ever tried to work with 70 megabyte camera RAW files (which take ten minutes to upload over 3Mb/768kb DSL), you'll understand why I'm not convinced that wireless/cloud is the future. That and the fact that storing that much data in the cloud costs as much as buying a new hard drive every couple of months.
It was a pipe dream when Larry Ellison convinced Apple to build a no-hard-drive Apple "network computer" that eventually turned into the iMac, and it is still a pipe dream today. We're still decades away from the Internet being fast enough to be viable as an alternative to local storage, IMO.
Most modern SSDs use the same form factor as a hard drive, so if this can handle hard drives, then it should also trivially handle any 2.5" SSD.
Depends on whether you need those things while on the go. Carrying a bag with a pile of adapters is kind of a pain in the backside. That said, I agree that they should include HDMI, a bigger battery, etc. Also, I hope their SD card slot is a modern one that supports UHS-II instead of that ancient, crippled UHS-I SD card slot that Apple keeps putting in various machines.
A 4 TB SSD is way more than $999 by itself, and I highly doubt they would use an SSD to store that much data. It would make more sense to have 1 TB SSD as an option and 4 TB HD ($140 or so) as an option. Or, for that matter, just ship it without the drives installed, and make it "BYOD".
Agreed. I hope that's a temporary hack during development, and that in the final version either A. that mystery port inside the machine was designed for this sorts of expansion chassis or B. they'll use a cable that takes a sharp 90 degree bend downwards right out of the jack, and provide a metal cover to protect it. Otherwise, that part is going to fail pretty quickly, probably rendering the whole expansion chassis (and maybe the laptop) unusable in the process.
It's an interesting perspective to see what the market response is to Apple's obsession with thinness. #anorexia
Seems wrong-headed to me. Something underneath the laptop is a good idea for footprint, but most people do like thin laptops -- witness the popularity of the airs, and all the imitators.
So, make it as a dock you set your laptop on top of. Buy one for home and one for the office. That's the best of both worlds. For travel, get a small side-mounting dock like the satchi.
So, make it as a dock you set your laptop on top of. Buy one for home and one for the office. That's the best of both worlds. For travel, get a small side-mounting dock like the satchi.
I don't think wireless for everything at home is so far fetched. 802.11ac is more than fast enough for most uses (at least mine, anyway), and WiGig is coming down the pipe too.
I also think wireless internet will likely end up giving the wired services a run for their money, at least at the lower end. It's basically impossible to start a wired ISP in the US; you only have to look at Google's extreme difficulty rolling out Fiber to the few cities that have it to realize that. With small cells and LTE carrier aggregation, carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile can likely give an acceptable experience for most, and also lower the prices of the traditional wired duopoly in the process. (By "acceptable", I mean able to stream 1080p or possibly even 4K video. The people who subscribe to the lower-end internet tiers aren't going to be doing much cloud stuff anyway outside of the occasional photo/video upload to Facebook/YouTube.)
That said, this view of the future skews more towards the demographic Apple's likely targeting than the creatives that have traditionally bought Mac(Book) Pros.
If he was sick, then so were (among many others) Charlotte Bronte, Louisa May Alcott and James Joyce, as well as journalists for NYT, New Yorker, and many other quality journals.
A thing can be unique in more ways or in a greater context, both of which qualify them to be described as more unique. If you are the largest person in your car pool, you are unique. If you're the largest person on the planet, you're more unique.
Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage gives copious evidence that those who "insist that 'unique' cannot be modified ... are clearly wrong", and that "those who believe that the use of such modifiers threatens to weaken" the meaning are also wrong, and that those who "regard the use of 'unique' to mean unusual or distinctive as a modern corruption are wrong", considering it has been used that way for more than a century.
So, I disagree with your nitpicking, but I have a nit of my own to pick: Does Macrumors not have access to a better narrator, who does not clip his words?
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Really? You are gonna use this? You are gonna make your laptop HUGE because you miss 1 port or two?