Launched by Apple CEO Tim Cook in March, the new MacBook builds upon years of learning about miniaturisation during iPad and iPhone development to deliver the thinnest and lightest MacBook yet. “Can you even see it? Can you even feel it?” joked Cook. But not everyone is happy with the decision to equip the system with just one port (USB-C) to handle power, peripherals and external displays.
“This is the lightest Mac we have ever made”, said Philip Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. It’s also among the quietest, it has no fan and uses solid-state storage, which means it won’t make a sound in use – unless you ask it to, of course.
“This is the lightest Mac we have ever made”, said Philip Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. It’s also among the quietest, it has no fan and uses solid-state storage, which means it won’t make a sound in use – unless you ask it to, of course.
The innovative system boasts a 12-inch Retina display, new butterfly keyboard technology and an all-new Force Touch trackpad – all of which feed into extreme portability. The passively cooled system is nearly onethird lighter than the previous most portable Mac notebook, the MacBook Air, but when you add it up it weighs about the same as an iPad combined with a third-party keyboard. This prompted Tim Bajarin of technology analysis firm Creative Strategies to say, “Because it’s even lighter than a combo of iPad and keyboard, [the MacBook will] be the thing that I’ll be taking with me”. Just like the iPhone 6, the iPad Air 2 and the iPad mini 3, the new MacBook is available in Gold, Silver and Space Grey.
The MacBook uses Intel’s 14-nanometre dualcore Broadwell Core M processors running at 1.1GHz, 1.2GHz or 1.3GHz (the latter being a build-to-order version), which Intel’s are able to Turbo Boost to much higher clock speeds. Apple says it took what it learned from the iPhone to build the smallest and highest-density logic board ever seen on a Mac, claiming a 67% shrink over the 11-inch MacBook Air. The new battery design is also interesting – the MacBook is so thin that most of its interior is dedicated to batteries. Apple claims the MacBook will run for nine hours between charges while browsing the web, or deliver 10 hours of iTunes movie playback. The company claims typical energy consumption of 10.10kWh per year, and in staying green the new MacBooks are free of many harmful toxins, including beryllium, arsenic and mercury.
Retina for your Apple eyes
Display resolution is 2,304x1,440 pixels (three million), which equates to a pixel density of 226ppi, which is almost identical to the 227ppi density of a MacBook Pro. Despite its high resolution, the screen uses 30% less energy than existing Mac notebook Retina displays, and is just 0.88mm thick. The display provides a 16:10 aspect ratio and a 178° viewing angle.
Press the new button
Not the same as the butterfly-like TrackWrite fold-out keyboard featured on 1995’s IBM ThinkPad 701 laptop (now part of the design collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), Apple’s new keyboard is based on butterfly switches below the keys rather than the older style of scissor mechanism used on many laptops. The Apple-designed butterfly mechanism is 40% thinner than the traditional scissor mechanism, yet Apple claims it is four times more stable, preventing the key from bottoming-out on such a thin keyboard before the press has registered, and providing greater precision no matter where your finger taps the character. Each key is individually backlit too.
Taptic is the name
The Force Touch trackpad introduces ‘taptic’ technology, which uses sound and finger sensations to fool you into thinking the trackpad actually moves in response to you pressing on its surface. This clever system relies on four magnets which iFixit believes create a physical vibration in response to the pressure of your touch. You can expect Force Touch trackpad support to appear in third-party apps, as Apple has said it will release an SDK to enable this in future.
Sacrifices or Strengths
Eagle-eyed readers will realise Apple has made a few more sacrifices in this release. The MacBook does not support USB-A connectors, meaning iPhone users will need to purchase an adaptor or use iCloud sync. Nor does it utilise Apple’s magnetic MagSafe power cable, meaning there is a chance of accidental damage to the one slot on your machine if someone blunders into your cable.
One final victim of the drive toward ultra-portability is the glowing Apple logo on the lid, which has been replaced with a stainless steel version.
The cost of the new MacBook starts at £1,049 for the 1.1GHz Intel Core M processor model with 256GB of flash storage, rising to £1,299 for 512GB storage and a 1.2GHz Intel Core M processor. Both ship with their maximum 8GB of RAM. A 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core M processor build-to-order model is also available.
The jury is out on the success of the new notebook. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo thinks Apple will sell just 450,000 MacBooks in the first half of the year, because consumers will be turned off by the presence of just one port. Make no mistake, though, Apple has created a new future for the MacBook product as the most portable Mac ever.
One more thing…
Alongside the MacBook’s introduction, Apple improved most of its other MacBooks, upgrading processors, introducing the new Force Touch trackpad in the 13-inch MacBook Pro and adding faster flash storage to it and the MacBook Air.
