MacBook 2015 - My thoughts

Image from CNET

If you're a diehard Apple fan, I'm afraid this article won't exactly be for you. You see, I'm not a big fan of the MacBook, the new ultra-think notebook Apple brought back from the grave at their 2015 keynote. I'll tell you why.

First off: yes, it's pretty. Apple products usually are. Aside from the gold colour (which I don't care for) it looks nice, and the screen will definitely be excellent, because it's a very high resolution, IPS display. But that's not what I'm after here. Its physical hardware is rather questionable to me. The new MacBook doesn't make sense to me - It's essentially an updated MacBook Air, which makes me wonder why the new MacBook is a separate laptop, and not branded as a 12" MacBook Air.

It also only has two ports and two ports only - one for headphones, and the other for pretty much everything else. I honestly think it's a bit early to be using USB C only. Of course, it's much, much faster than USB 3.0 and it's a lot smaller (which is probably why Apple opted for the USB C rather than USB 3.0) but the problem with that is the fact that you'll need an adapter in order to use all your current devices. If you were to get one directly from Apple, it won't be cheap. Also, as far as I'm concerned, there'll be no charging and using USB devices at the same time.

It includes a new trackpad which detects force. That's an interesting feature for sure, but one I'm not so sure is really necessary. I think it's really just a marketing tactic and it doesn't really have too many uses. I personally would never use such a trackpad. Of course, this is a very subjective fact - you might not feel the same way about it. But my opinion is that it's a marketing gimmick used to make it look more appealing.

Its engineering is still rather cool, if you ask me. The motherboard is extremely tiny - about 67% tinier than a MacBook Air motherboard (don't ask which one, I'm not sure. The sources didn't mention that.), and the overall laptop is 20% thinner than a MacBook Air. It's very small, and weighs about 2 pounds. It still has a very high build quality and I imagine that it will have a very nice feel to it.

But the thing I really don't like about it is the price to performance ratio. It features 8GB of RAM and flash storage based on the PCI-e bus, so it'll have extremely fast read and write speeds, and the graphics processing is what you'd expect from a small computer - Intel HD 5300 graphics. But the processor makes the computer much too overpriced. For a base price of $1,550CAD, you'll get a 1.1GHz Intel Core M. A MacBook Air with the 1.6GHz Intel Core i5 can easily outperform the 1.1GHz MacBook and it costs $450CAD less! The screen isn't as pretty and this 11" model is slightly smaller, but in my opinion, for price to performance, the base model MacBook Air is a better deal.

As a matter of fact, $1,500 can get you a 13" MacBook Air with the 2.2GHz dual core Intel Core i7, 8GB of RAM, Intel HD 6000 graphics and 128GB of PCI-e flash storage. It's much faster and still costs $50 less. If you're willing to go refurbished, you can get an even better deal.

Right now, I'm looking at a refurbished 15.4" Retina Display MacBook Pro with a 2.3GHz quad core Intel Core i7, 8GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M graphics with 1GB of video memory and 256GB of flash storage. Like the 12" MacBook, it still has a really nice Retina Display; yet, for $1,560 (Yes, just $10 more than the base model 12" MacBook) you're getting a vastly more powerful (and larger) notebook.

Or, if your heart isn't set on a new MacBook, you can get a Windows machine even more powerful yet. I'm looking at an HP ENVY laptop on BestBuy's website. This machine, for $1,400, gets you a 2.5GHz quad core Intel Core i7, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of hard disk storage, NVIDIA GeForce 840M graphics with 2GB of video memory and a 17.3" touchscreen display!

As you can tell, I certainly wouldn't buy this product. Maybe you would, but that's not my business.