Shaves face every three days... check. Leaves clothes around the apartment... check. Wash dishes when sink is full... check. I can reasonably expect myself to be a man.
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More Claims of MacBook Pro Adopting MacBook Air Form Factor in 2012 Redesign
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Yes, because obviously I'm going to boot the OS off the cloud. No really, comon sense people, do we need to spell out every little word ?
Let me clarify... I use my MBP out in the field, sometimes in the middle of nowhere, for work. If I was sitting at Starbucks or in a park or in my living room and working an MBA would be fine. I was being a bit tongue and cheek and didn't mean to imply that those who use MBAs only use them to play and those who use MBPs never play but only work.
What is important is that in my line of work, I need a device I can use in the middle of nowhere. I need a machine more flexible than an MBA. Both the MBP and MBA are missing an important periphery that I could use. Replaceable Batteries!!! However, I can get around that by lugging extra third-party batteries with me if needed. What I can't get around is the need for the DVD and extra portable hard drives that I need to store all my files....
As I recall, I need storage, RAM and fast processors and graphics processors (processing power), electrical power (back up batteries.)
I also don't know why Apple refused to include USB3 along with their adoption of Thunderbolt. There still are very few Thunderbolt external storage options compared with USB 3. It's great that Apple is embracing Thunderbolt, but the reality is that suppliers are slow to adopt Thunderbolt....
So you're willing to carry extra hard drives, a 3rd party portable battery... but not an external DVD drive ?
I don't get it.
Actually, an OS can be booted off the cloud. Lion Installer is already very minimal, and sits in EFI (I assume, since replacing with a blank drive doesn't preclude installing Lion). It's just not practical yet. And, following my chromebook example, these are already supplied with barely enough internal storage to keep the OS. I assume when cable-like latencies are achieved across the network by Google, it will start pumping out even leaner, less useful chromebooks.Yes, because obviously I'm going to boot the OS off the cloud. No really, comon sense people, do we need to spell out every little word ?
This isn't going to happen soon. Apple designed them so they would fit tightly inside, increasing capacity. I also suspect they may have a structural role.
It's not to say there is "plenty" of USB3 devices on the market, either. Most non-Apple PCs sold today are still USB2 based. What I don't understand however is Apple's push to technology when they are the first to adopt it, but sometimes trail behind about others. Do they feel they don't have to bend to populace tech USB is?
I have to agree. From this description, it seems that a 300g difference won't be noticed. Or, maybe he regularly uses optical drive, whereas extra hard drive storage is occasionally but regularly required?
No odd in a pro would be a bad marketing decision on apples part. The would completely alienate people in rural areas and not to mention one of their biggest if not the biggest group they target, which is college students. Many schools often get overloaded at time making the connections slow and some are now even putting data caps on their networks.
You know what, you're right. I'm tired of not discussing with you (since you obviously can't come back from left field, where you've been all this time).
Again, if you want to join us in the actual discussion that was actually taking place : Optical drives and internal, spinning platter hard drives, are not "professional features" that are required for "real work". Someone can perform their job on a MacBook Air just fine and someone can use a MacBook Pro as an entertainment device exclusively.
No optical drive is a no buy for the pro series. Why? Because I need one for my work. Sure for home use most people can probably do without it but if you need to give customers hard copies of your work you did, the most cost efficient way is to burn it on an optical disk.
Apple has gone mainstream the past years and I don't blame them. That's where the money is. But it should not forget which buyers kept them going in the lesser years.
Apple has gone mainstream the past years and I don't blame them. That's where the money is. But it should not forget which buyers kept them going in the lesser years.
Too bad if you can't follow a discussion where it doesn't follow a straight path.
All boils down to your definition of "professional", that seems to be be very narrow. I don't adhere to this view. What I think is Apple probably designed the Pro line with features that most professionals are more likely to use., and the non-Pro with features that should appeal more to consumers. That is not to state that professionals can't cross the line and prefer the leaner machine.
I keep the hard drives at base (a hotel or a camp in the bush and one external battery with me on the run, if I need my computer during the day {which I also prefer to use after a day's work - but sometimes am required to have one near me in the field} -- I could carry an external optical drive, but prefer to have it integrated in the computer... It is easier and less to shlep...
I am no t the only one who has to deal with this. My wife is a scientist who works in the middle of nowhere and needs computing power by her side. I hope Apple does not forsake those of us who really need these devices to be complete. One day, perhaps, an optical drive will be obsolete, like floppy disks. But today, optical drives are very current and important.
I completely agree regarding the optical drives and spinning hard drives. I'd rather have solid state and external optical drives for the work I do. Like I already said, the Superdrive is junk anyway. My main concerns regarding the MacBook Pro getting closer to the MacBook Air are:
1. Power. As long as the machine remains as powerful as it has been, most professionals will be just fine. What I don't want to see is a step down in processing power just to fit the computer into a sleaker, more appealing package. The power is essentially what makes it professional.
2. Ports. I need ports. I need USB ports. I need Firewire ports. As it is, I wish the current Macbook Pro had more, not less. Thunderbolt looks fantastic, but many industries aren't ready for computers to start abandoning USB or Firewire in place of Thunderbolt. Add a thunderbolt port and I'll be grateful, but replace the firewire port with it and I'll be furious. We're still using old drives and peripherals that require these ports. For one example, the video industry needs firewire because there aren't any video cameras yet with a thunderbolt port.
The first problem doesn't scare me. I think Apple will keep it powerful. But the ports worry me. The design keeps getting sleaker and more minimal, and ports seem to disappear over the years. That doesn't always work for professional machines.
Biologists FTW!
Scientific couple, lovely
Thanks Cubytus....
Wife -- epidemiologist, MD, insect-borne disease specialist and researcher (particularly malaria)
Me -- Pro Photographer, Scientist in geo.... (not half as smart as my beautiful wife!!!)
We love our work, but we love one another more and we need the right tools for the field. For us, the field is the middle of nowhere.
What is ideal for some people here, may be a severe compromise for us. In fact, the MBP is a compromise already, and the Air isn't even possible for us to use, but we love the weight.
We could definitely use USB 3 on our MBPs. Why Appie's reluctantancy to give us technology everyone else uses, if they don't name claim to it is beyond me. USB 3 has been standard for several years. Graphics, statistical analysis and scientific programs all need lots of computing power, so we need those third-party back-up batteries (which we use sparingly.) And we need fast CPUs and mucho RAM.
Thunderbolt is better, but while waiting for reasonably priced competitive thunderbolt peripherals, USB 3 should have been included. I am sure Apple has its reasons, but it is frustrating to see others using faster drives than I can use on my MBP without paying a ransom to the hard drive companies.
Is it impolite to ask where you met each other? At least both of you found a way to get paid to travel.
Still, USB 3.0 is technically years old, but Intel only started to support it from 2011 onwards. Apple may not have to do much about it when Intel also has its own agenda. For example, Apple still ships inferior Intel-based GPUs while more powerful and equally frugal nvidia solutions do exist, because Intel's license doesn't allow the use of their latest CPUs with anything else than Intel's GPU (or something like that); Intel has developped Thunderbold interface, and may try to push it first. So Apple may not be at fault here.
Even in other non-Apple PCs, you have to go quite high in the price range to find a USB 3-compatible laptop. And USB 3 equipment isn't very commonplace yet.
For me, statistical processing could be done even on Pentium-era computers, if only they were compatible with modern software. But my situation isn't typical, and even very low efficiency Java-based software can do the job reasonably well. If you require more data-mining, that would be different. I think epidemiology, especially in remote places, requires testing all possible data, using all kinds of possible links between diseases and causing factors.
Little puzzled about the need for an optical drive - please tell me you're not field installing SAS
. But I too am a fan of the MBP as a research machine - while I love the Air to death, the amount of RAM it can take is just not going to cut it.Depends on the Epidemiology
Generally speaking, data storage is the bigger problem. You can get some really big data sets going (though for those studies you really should have a better setup than someone's laptop) and many of the popular statistical packages (R, I'm looking at you...) load those sets into memory.
But in terms of the actual statistics? Those can be handled by really any computer Apple sells right now unless you go in some very odd directions, which you should really do once you're home anyway.
If I still had years ahead to finish a research project, I would have indulged myself over 16GB RAM. But there's no reasonable justification for it for now.Little puzzled about the need for an optical drive - please tell me you're not field installing SAS
I could never quite quickly adapt R to my needs. There's a lack of statistical packages that operate in an Excel-like fashion, or at least understand Excel's or LibreOffice's formats, and R is no exception. When you aggregate data on the field, it's often following the quickest and most logical way, i.e. multi-sheet cellsheet. Unfortunately, with stat packages, you often need to go with the lowest common denominator, that means formula-less CSV.Depends on the Epidemiology
Generally speaking, data storage is the bigger problem. You can get some really big data sets going (though for those studies you really should have a better setup than someone's laptop) and many of the popular statistical packages (R, I'm looking at you...) load those sets into memory.
But in terms of the actual statistics? Those can be handled by really any computer Apple sells right now unless you go in some very odd directions, which you should really do once you're home anyway.
For a young scientist or student, "at home" only refers to a place, not a particular setting. We just don't have what it takes to buy two powerful computers, and just keep on using what we have, ideally a powerful 15" MBP.
Agreed. But home is also a place where you can viably let say, a particularly nasty MCMC-based program cook overnight. Certainly more than in the field. Or if you're a student, where there's access to University-level computing resources.
I don't know, maybe I'm old fashioned, but, as I've said in an other post, I would like to have DVD (or even better a BR) at my disposal in a high end notebook. And if Superdrive (don't know, haven't used MBP too long) is junk then for me the most logical thing would be to make it better, not to throw it away. As for SDD it's cool, but the storage capacity vs the price is horrible.
As for the rest I fully agree. Plus, 2 USB ports in MBP (that close to each other) is almost ridiculous.
I'd love that too, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
And yes, SDD is so expensive right now, but I'm sure they'll go down. Remember what hard drives used to cost? SDD is still new technology, but once it's standard we're likely to see a price drop.
What is an MCMC in that context? Don't count too much on university resources. You'd be surprised to see how certain advisors can be unhelpful. Plus, university computing resources usually means command-line, SSL-based access to servers, not interactive mode. Documentation is hard to come by, also. It's simply more practical sometimes to run that software on our own machines.
I liked the older Pro. There was a USB port on each side.
Please, please tell Apple you miss the old design. Wasn't as sleek as the unibody, but surely provided what we needed in flexibility. It didn't weight more. It wasn't larger. It was only a tad thicker.
Markov-Chain Monte Carlo. One of the techniques used in Bayesian statistics, which is generally good at making underpowered laptops cry uncle
It's not actually a particular type of regression - it can be used with any sort of regression you can think of. Linear, logistic, proportional hazards...
What MCMC is is a fairly elegant way to get the posterior distribution of your estimates, if you're working in a Bayesian, rather than frequentist frameworks. For most models with any type of complexity, its the best way to get the posterior - doing it with math is a pain or impossible. But MCMC relies on repeated sampling, and thus is somewhat computationally intensive.
Biostatistics types have also started using it *not* for Bayesian work with models that have convergence issues. Binomial regression (regression to get an actual RR rather than an OR for categorical data) or certain survival models sometimes just fail. MCMC...magically solves some of this, at the expense of computing time.
If only scientists had proper stat courses...
Does the MCMC computing method allows one to write better papers? More likely to be considered? Or more precise, scientifically speaking?