Saturday, June 16, 2012

new macbook pro retina and other updates very welcome indeed

These are my opinions and speculations about recent Apple hardware releases.  Apple recently released new versions of apple macbook air and macbook pro.  Several folks I work with have already ordered macbook pro retina systems.

I would welcome USB3, larger RAM, larger SSD/flash storage, and better CPUs available across the board.  I'm expecting that an updated thunderbolt display with USB3 will become available as part of the natural progression of things.

The new retina-display macbook pro with up to 16GB RAM, 4-cores of CPU, and up to 768GB of SSD/flash (not to mention 2 thunderbolt ports) is definitely interesting for reasons other than the display.  I have employees who compile code and run multiple intensive apps and do sometimes complain about needing more CPU power and RAM.  These types of users are indeed rare.

I would wait for a laptop with a retina display until there is more ubiquitous support from other applications.  If I could do away with a separate large display in the future, the retina display could well be worth the cost.  I'll try it out when co-worker's system becomes available.

iPad wins for heavy iTunes and iPhone app users over other tablets

thoughts about alternatives to the iPad and my iPad experience continued...

I use iTunes for music, movies, and ibooks.

Copying music (and music in the cloud), movies, and ibooks to an iPad is a no-brainer.  The networked iTunes experience enables me to play any movies on my computer with iTunes on my iPad as well.  I recently did use this on a family vacation.

My least happy experiences with the iPad have been when I tried to cobble together a solution - using BOX and iannotate.  This "worked" but was not a pleasant smooth experience.

If I were to use a MS windows tablet or an android tablet, I believe such experiences of "cobbling together" solutions would become common place.  I would have the freedom to do everything except what I want to do - just have things work out-of-the-box with the media as I have as I have it.

If you have not bought into iTunes media, you might not feel so locked in.  I do feel locked in to a really good experience with my media and even my existing iPhone apps which I can copy to my iPad.

Any MS or Android tablet I would have to buy apps for again.  I would have to learn a whole new ecosystem of apps and how they work, when and how they can be trusted...  Ugh.

My work has a mobile device management system that works for iPad.  It will soon work for some Android tablets but does not at this moment.  I have not even heard the MS tablet OS will ever be supported.

In short, I have reasons to use the iPad.  I am extremely dis-incented to use anything else.

ipad 1 experience:

I recently acquired an iPad1 for work.  I have not been on the iPad "bandwagon" - with a macbook air and iPhone I have not felt a need for an iPad before.  However, I have been in a class with voluminous documents.  Those documents happen to be available via PDF.  I borrowed the iPad 1 to test the utility of an iPad for PDF use in place of the exceedingly heavy 3-ring binder I was using.

I ended up using iAnnotate to read the PDFs.  That meant I could annotate/mark up the PDFs.  Ibooks does not let you annotate PDFs like it does normal ibooks.  I used BOX to copy files from my computer to iAnnotate.

All-in-all I found it usable but a bit of a pain.  It was not a home run experience, but did make it so that I did not have to travel with a thick 3-ring binder.

If I just want to read PDFs in ibooks, the iPad is a much better experience - not so much "fiddling around".

I find the iPad 1 to be perfectly usable for this use even as the "new" iPad retina is available.