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Using The Retina MacBook

12. September 2012 · Categories: Apple

I finally received my Retina MacBook, and it was worth the extremely long wait (I ordered the first week after it came out). My previous unit was a 17″ anti-gloss, so I was quite apprehensive how the screen would turn out. I needn’t have worried, the screen is absolutely amazing, the best computer screen I have ever used. Combined with the rather beefy hardware powering it, it makes for the best computer you can buy today.

The Screen

The screen brings back from the iPad / iPhone all the good stuff:

It has very stable colours from all angles, something I have waited to come back to notebooks ever since Lenovo stopped using IPS panels on the Thinkpad. Especially for colour work this is indispensable, as with other notebook displays even a small change in head position could change colours.
The resolution brings a quite noticeable improvement, both in the sharpness of the text and the detail you can see in photos.
It has a LED backlight, so there is no warmup time until the display shows good colours
The screen already has pretty good colours from factory calibration. My old MacBook was miles off, by more than 1000 K, while this one looks pretty close (It does not recognise my calorimeter anymore, so I had no chance to measure it yet)

As for working with it, the reduced glare really makes enough difference so that the screen can outshine the reflections, and they are not noticeable in my indoor use.

I use the screen at the scaled 1920×1200 resolution, and it works surprisingly well. The anti-aliasing used by Mac OS X ensures that the text remains pretty sharp even when scaled. Some software like Microsoft Office is not yet optimised for the display, and while they look horrible in native resolution, the scaled resolution makes them bearable. For work, I still have a virtual machine running under Windows XP, and even there the fonts look almost as good as on the 17″, after I increased the contrast used by ClearType.

But as good as the screen is, it is still only halfway there. Small fonts are much more readable than on the 17″, but they still loose visibly in detail. At the same physical size, they already look better on the iPhone. I would love to see another doubling in pixel density, the “Reality Display”.

Audio

The speakers are remarkable good for their small size, but there is one area where the Retina is not matching the quality of the rest of the system: the audio connector. I typically use headphones with my computer, and the ones I have are pretty loud. So I use them at the lowest loudness, and when playing music I can hear some white noise. Even though it has low volume, it is pretty present, something which I have not experienced with any iPhone or iPad, not even with my old desktop computer.

One issue which iOS shares is that starting / stopping music is not perfect, and produces small, but audible clicks.

Performance

The Retina is very snappy, especially the SSD makes a huge difference. This is very pronounced when running a virtual machine, where the file system is pretty fragmented, with a filesystem inside a container, which has snapshots all over the place. Some tasks where it used to take 15+ seconds to prime the cache are now done in less than a second, very impressive.

On the other hand for rather CPU bound tasks the improvements are not that much, especially if they use mostly integer calculations and cannot make much use of parallel execution. There I have seen as little improvement as a 50% speed increase.

Unfortunately Safari could be smoother when scrolling content. It would really help if it could transfer more of the rendering to the GPU, rendering the different HTML regions into bitmaps which are then composed on the GPU to provide smooth scrolling.

The Upgrade

As my first switch between Macs, I was positively surprised how painless the process was. Create a new admin account not matching anything on your old system, log in and use the migration assistant to restore from a Time Machine backup. Fire up Aperture to reconnect you photos, and re-authenticate all your software (if you can find all the credentials, that is), and you are done. Compared to my previous Windows updates an absolutely painless process.

The Package

Easily two pounds lighter than the 17″, it has lightened my backpack noticeably. But as I only use it on some kind of table, it does not really matter, I do not carry it for hours on end. Here the reduced height of the unit is more useful, it makes typing subtly more comfortable. Another difference to the 17″ are the rubber feet. Unlike the 17″, the Retina moves much more easily on my table, so much so that I often unintentionally move it a bit, but it fortunately just have enough grip that nothing moves while typing.

Heat

Another problem is that the unit can become quite hot if used heavily. At the moment there is nothing you can do apart from forcing the integrated graphics using gfxCardStatus. This could be much better if Apple were to use the programmable thermal design power feature of the CPU. Then you could tell it to use a reduced thermal budget when you want to keep the unit cooler and quieter.

Will the Kindle Fire put pressure on the iPad?

06. September 2012 · Categories: Apple

With their well specced new tablets, Amazon has unveiled the best alternative to the iPad yet. It is significantly cheaper, with up to $500 savings for the 4G variant with the base plan, but it really looks like a content consumption device, with a significantly worse software offering. Amazon has not even revealed in fine print the base OS, nor can it display ePub natively. So it will maybe cause Apple to slightly cheapen the iPad ( likely by doubling memory at the same price points), but a $249 iPad mini should be safe.

Also Amazon is saving money by reducing the size of its offerings compared to the iPad. As seen in the table, Apple's offerings are a good deal bigger, mainly thanks to their 4:3 ratio which helps a lot when having to edit something.

The new iPhone

04. September 2012 · Categories: Apple

After the announcements for the Apple event next week have been sent out, I am now convinced that the next iPhone will be called the iPhone 5. There are two reasons for it:

The invitation has a shadow with a 5
Apple will likely want to continue to sell this model after its successor has been introduced, and it is never a good move to sell old stuff with a name that evokes dated, like iPhone model late 2012 would in 2014

The rumors of dropping the number came from the new iPad, but the situation there is different. If we assume that an iPad mini is coming, it will take over the budget role in the lineup. And with its introduction, the iPad 2 will no longer have a role, and will be discontinued to simplify the line up.

Apple almost never does price competition with older models. It makes the positioning more difficult than needed, and the iPhone is the exception because there not enough room to meaningfully differentiate the screen size of the phone without severely limiting its usefulness.

Touchscreen Balkanisation

27. August 2012 · Categories: Apple, Copyright

With the jury handing Apple a huge win against Samsung (Florian Müller has a good overview), I feel conflicted in my reaction. On the one hand I welcome it as Samsung has been quite willful in copying the iPhone almost verbatim, and they have definitely crossed the line of decency here, on the other hand the asserted patents are uncomfortably close to core touch screen functionality: the over scroll bounce patent, tap to zoom, pinch to zoom. If you remember that Apple also has patents about gesture detection heuristic and inertial scrolling on the books, then this amounts to a monopoly for still another 15 years on very essential user interface paradigms for touch screens.

These are important breakthroughs, but the problem is the balkanization of user interfaces this would bring. While the vendors would love the extra lock in, it is not good for society to have every touch screen device use its own touch vocabulary. The conventions were pretty much in the air when the iPhone debuted (see this brilliant TED talk), and their core (that is everything using at most two fingers, plus the four finger swipe) should be available to everyone. Otherwise we get what the situation with cars was 100 years ago. Can you imagine not finding the accelerator or the brake pedal? That used to be quite normal, and this is not a situation I want to see for touch screen interfaces. They will be just too pervasive that it can be acceptable to have to relearn them between devices.

After all, patents are not a god given right, but a creation of men to encourage extra research and development. They were created because for society the benefit of extra innovation is higher than the licenses one would have to pay to the inventors, and the slower spread of the invention because of extra costs. But I honestly do not think that this should entitle Apple to a payment in the hundreds of billion dollars, as they believe is their due. They demand 30$ per unit, we can expect 7.5 replacements in the next 15 years per consumer, and have half a billion users likely growing to 2 billion people.

Apple has already been richly rewarded, while being quite stingy with the actual inventors behind these patents, none of them even remotely getting anything close to what Tim Cook is making. So the appropriate way to deal with it would be to give Apple say 10 million dollar per patent in compensation, and then put these into the public domain. After all these inventions would likely have been discovered independently by now.

The Art of Saving

05. August 2012 · Categories: Apple, Software

When Lloyd Chambers noticed the rather peculiar way the Save As command in Mountain Lion works, it got me thinking about how saving files should really work. During normal operation you want to never notice saving. The document should be just there when you need it, with the content you expect to see. So documents should be saved automatically, and they should preferably even get a good name automatically.

Once you have your file, it will need to support a few typical use cases:

You modify the content, and want the latest version kept around
You want to compare with a previous version to review or undo some changes
You want a specific version of the file to stick around, typically a version that you have shared with someone
You want to use an existing document with similar content as the basis to create a new document

If we look at the current implementation in OS X, we see that it is well suited to only the first two requirements, but the last two are not really supported. You essentially get a cop out in the form of the Duplicate command. But what would a better implementation look like?

To deal with use case 3, we should get the following commands to support us:

Save Named Version will save a version which you can give a name. The OS guarantees that it will never delete this version on its own.
Export Version allows you to select a version and create a new file from it. This would basically subsume the standard export dialog by adding the native file format as an export option. The important feature here is that the exported version will have all history removed from it.
Clean Up Versions would allow you to scrub old versions hanging around, especially the named versions. With storage prices so cheap nowadays, this would not be used very often, but it would give peace of mind.

And for the last use case, we should be able to express our intent directly as a file command:

New from current Document will duplicate the document, remove its history, and treat it as an unnamed document from now on, maybe with the copy of name used as the default save name. The old document will stay around in its own window.
New from Document Changes will do the same, but also restore all changes made to the original document since it was opened. This supports people who start typing before deciding that they wanted to have a new document.

This way documents would finally behave as one unit, making the cognitive task for users a lot easier. The old save as command only makes sense as long as you understand that each document has two instances, one on disk and one in memory, and that changes done in memory are only copied to disk when you explicitly save. But if you treat the memory only as a cache of the file on disk, one layer of complexity disappears, and working with files become a lot more logical. No wonder that Apple wants to get away from this, because it makes using the computer unnecessarily complicated.

But this goal requires that your documents behave consistently no matter where they are stored. The fact that versions are only supported for local files on HFS+ volumes is a usability disaster, because now versions are making life even more complicated than before. You need to learn one model for local files, and a completely different one for remote files. This is a recipe for mistakes. So unfortunately this new approach is an all or nothing proposition: Have it implemented on all supported file systems, or nowhere. As the absolute minimum implement a local versions storage for all files opened on network drives, and keep them around for a month, so that we can rely on the versions being there when we need them.

The iPad mini

17. July 2012 · Categories: Apple

There is a lot of speculation currently about Apple adding a 7 inch iPad to its lineup this fall, as the acclaim for the 7 inch Nexus starts to build. A good overview has been given by John Gruber. The main question would be what place in the line up it should have. It is my conviction that the current iPad is not too large, it would work nearly everywhere, even in a crowded subway car, but that it is simply too heavy to be used one handed. Given how much of its weight is actually in the battery, we know that with improvements in display and processor technology the iPad will come down in weight in the future.

But until this future emerges, it will be much easier to produce a separate device with a smaller screen to get the weight down. To hold a device somewhat comfortably in one hand, it should have a weight of 300 grams, maybe 350 grams. The Nexus 7 is 340 grams, and it is this low weight that makes it stand out. A 7.85 inch iPad has 65% of the area of the current iPad, so would be 394 grams could we simply shrink the iPad 2. But I expect Apple to do their best to reduce the weight even further, and to not include a Retina display until their power consumption comes down enough to keep the entire device below 350 grams.

I also suspect such a device to be cheap, say 250$ for the 16 GByte base, and to replace the iPad 2 in the line up. It will be close enough in functionality that the iPad 2 is no longer needed as a budget option, and the iPad mini is much stronger because it will also be for the people who most value the lesser weight.

The other question is how long we will have to wait until the iPad mini gets a Retina display of similar quality than the current one. This will be an issue because you require such a screen to make the device an excellent reading machine. And the smaller form factor will tend to tilt more towards consumption than creation than a larger iPad. Personally I would recommend to wait until you will get a retina display.

Apple screws up App Store

06. July 2012 · Categories: Apple

Apple screwed up the delivery of binaries in the App Store, and now the problem has been corrected. But then you read how the user should “correct” the problem: delete the app and download again. Small problem with this advice: all your data gets lost. Fortunately, the makers of GoodReader have described a workaround.

But I wonder: Why can someone at Apple get away with a solution that involves data loss for the user? Would they themselves find it OK for someone to delete their favorite app and cause all data to be lost?

A solution without data loss would be to simply increment the version number of the current executable, and push that out as an update. I wonder if this can be done automatically with the binary submitted to Apple, or if they must ask the developers to do that and resubmit. But even if the second option is needed, they should do a priority review of the resubmitted apps, and make sure they have the updates out within a day.

And then you wait for a bit, and then it turns out that Apple has actually done the right thing. Teaches you not to scream too early.

This also reminds me of another problem with the standard app installation and deinstallation process: There is no way for you to reinstall a single app and have its data restored. This would not be that difficult to implement: iTunes would keep backup data even for uninstalled apps around, until you delete the app from your computer. And when you add the app again to a device, you would get a fresh field in the app list: Restore last app data. This would allow you to unload games and when you decide to play them again, you could easily restore your last game status. Quite helpful when games are 500 Megabytes, and game data is less than 100 Kilobyte. Wonder if Apple will do such a thing, as it would reduce demand for high capacity devices.

The Retina MacBook

12. June 2012 · Categories: Apple

Apple has introduced their new MacBook Pro with Retina Display, and it is a photographer’s dream machine. Finally we have a notebook that surpasses the image quality of the old Thinkpad’s, that has an IPS display with the wide viewing angles that are necessary to correctly judge the color of a photo. It will be absolutely amazing to have a display matching the new iPad on a notebook, and for most people the reduced weight will more than compensate for the reduced connections and loss of expandability.

With the removal of the 17″ MacBook Pro, this new machine is intended to replace it, and I wonder how well it will do that. Theoretically it is not a problem, because given the high resolution you can just get a bit closer to the screen to get the same field of view as on the 17″ model. The problem will be the software. It will assume 110 dpi and scale the elements accordingly. But to get the same scaling as you had, you would have to assume 133 dpi * 17.0 / 15.4 = 147 dpi, which is 33% denser. This means you could show on the 17″ display 78% more content, which is a pretty stark contrast, as shown by Aperture.

(110 dpi on 15.4″)

(133 dpi on 17″)

And when writing documents it becomes even worse, with pages you loose 150 pixels from the height, with Word 250 pixels, so your document area shrinks from 1000 pixels to 700 pixels, meaning that with the 17″ you had 40% more vertical space for your documents, even though the screen is only 10% higher.

So for Mac software to work properly in all configurations it will need to support three resolution steps. The basis would be what is currently called small and works best with a 110 dpi iMac display. In addition you still need a larger variant ( 120% or 125%) for people with aging eyes, and now also a smaller variant ( 80%, maybe 75%) for the Retina MacBook.

I wonder how long the transition will take, Apple provides five scaling steps, so hopefully this is a sign that Apple desires to support these steps with new apps.

The loss of extensibility after the fact is not such a big deal, with an 768 GByte option available, and the compact external ethernet connector not eating up much space. Now waiting first for the USB3 update for the Thunderbolt display, and then the Retina update for it as well.

The Dangers of Windows 8

29. May 2012 · Categories: Apple, Software

Michael Mace has written a very nice article about the problems with Windows 8. It clearly describes the problems I feel the software will face.

The main problem with Windows 8 is that Microsoft wants to leverage Windows to fight the iPad. When you read about the the design goals, you see that Microsoft sees the future as converged devices, with keyboard, touchpad and touchscreen all in one. On the other hand, Apple, which clearly moves OS X into the direction of supporting new features introduced with iOS, keeps the user interface paradigm based on using a keyboard in combination with a touchpad, and improves upon iCloud to ensure the interoperability between them.

The basic problem with the Microsoft vision is the tension over screen sizes. The larger the screen, the larger the battery needed to power it, and the heavier the entire device. The iPad already weights 662g (1.46 lbs), and feels on the heavy side. This means that the larger screens that are needed for efficiently working with classic Windows will be too heavy and even too large to create a reasonable tablet experience. The core benefit of the iPad is that you can use it on the couch, or anywhere else without a table, and that only works as long as the device is not too heavy. But for a desktop, you want the largest screen that you can fit on the table(s) you are using and still be able to carry around.

And an iPad is cheap enough that you can buy it in addition to a laptop or desktop, we are no longer in the nineties, when a reasonable computer was much more expensive, where even when you spent 5000$ on a machine you felt it could be faster for daily work, while nowadays only video editing / computer animation feel slow on a 1000$ computer.

Also mouse based computing has different constraints, it requires different trade offs for the user interface. Metro Apps will always be suboptimal when used with a keyboard, and making classic Windows Apps work with touch requires you to waste a lot of space to make the controls touchable. Take the layout for example: thanks to Fitt’s Law, you will want to put controls on all sides with a mouse, but for touch you will want them together so that you do not have to move your hand around. Or if you have a lot of different tools to present to the user: for the mouse, you will typically show all of them, densely grouped together, and rely on the high precision possible with a mouse so that the user can select what is needed. For touch, you will provide multiple panels with the information shown in a compact way, and when you click on one of these, they will expand to show touch friendly controls to manipulate.

Let us take a very telling example of the difference between touch and mouse: The humble list. On a mouse based device, lists can easily be very tightly spaced, and a tabular grid works very well. On a touch based device on the other hand, you will need 3 to 4 lines heights to pick a line. So you will want to use three / four lines per item, using the extra lines to put info below the header instead of to the right, and maybe use multiple columns of items to avoid wasting too much space. This will mean a different approach to spreadsheets than on the desktop.

So in the end I believe that the approach Apple takes, that you need a different UI for touch than for the mouse, is the right one.

(As an aside, the best way to select text on a touch screen would be to use something like the line loop in Diet Coda, and then use a tap with another finger while you still hold down your primary finger to switch over to switch over to select mode, with the main finger now extending a selection anchored on the position you were at when you did the tap)

The Retina Mac

11. May 2012 · Categories: Apple

Since the retina iPad came out, it has become quite obvious that Apple will want to provide retina displays also for their notebooks, especially since the discovery of double resolution art work in Mountain Lion.
The question now is which resolution will Apple choose for the lineup. I am pretty convinced that they will want to have only one resolution to make scaling the display production process easy, and that makes 220 dpi the natural choice. It is twice the 110 dpi found in the 27″ display, and with you keeping a slightly larger distance from the screen than with an iPad it would still classify as a Retina Display.

As you can see the required bandwidth would be large, and with 266 dpi requiring 46% more pixels than 220 dpi I believe it to be obvious that Apple will settle for 220 dpi as their only resolution.
The next question is: which models will get the retina display? Since Apple values simplicity, there are only two answers: all notebooks get or all Airs get it. I would not be surprised if Apple would wait with the Retina introduction until the screens can be produced in numbers even for 17″, to make Retina displays the distinctive feature for all MacBooks.