High Acuity » 2008

Archive for October, 2008

Apple

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

Last week Apple released the latest evolutions of their entire Macbook line and I have to say… I’m not too sure about certain elements of the design. I’m not a huge fan of the keys on Apple’s latest line of keyboards, which have now made it onto the entire Macbook line. I don’t like the look of the black keys on the aluminium casing, nor the black frame around the screen, or the screen itself for that matter. The glossy displays always look incredible on first sight, but the reflections can be a little distracting. That whole look reminds me of some of the cheap old PC imitations of the Macbook line. The specs also aren’t a huge improvement over my nearly-two-year-old Macbook Pro 17” which is a little disappointing. The optical drive is the same 8x Superdrive I have now and there’s no blue-ray drive to be seen, which has been a standard feature in most high-end PC laptops for the last year.

But let’s stretch our imaginations for just one crazy minute and assume that Jonathan Ive knows more about product design than I do and does actually know what he’s doing. I know! I know! It’s a stretch, but I think we can do it if we close our eyes, click our heels together and dream about that yellow brick road.

A couple of friends rushed to the Apple store the morning after Steve’s keynote to buy the Macbook Pros. As did my brother, who has finally made the switch to Mac and invested in the Macbook Pro, maxing-out all of the options for the 2.8GHz version with 4GB ram and he is thus far extremely happy, calling me regularly this weekend to gloat. As my flatmate pointed out to me, and I relayed to my brother, it’s quite shocking that as a gay man with a good sense of style, who enjoys extremely expensive designer suits, gadgets and technology, he has only just switched from PCs to Mac. He then told me he is going to install Windows Vista via Boot Camp for some of his work-based applications. I have understandably subsequently disowned him. It’s a tough decision, but one that had to be made. I know you understand.

There are some cool features in the new Macbooks though, most notably the ability to easily replace the hard drive, which is the fastest-degrading element of any computer, especially in terms of speed. This means that in a year or two you can shell out £50 to replace/upgrade your hard drive easily yourself. Or you could shell out £350 to £500 for the 128GB Solid State hard drive Apple are offering and avoid the speed reduction altogether. It has only one third of the capacity of the 320GB hard drive they’re offering as standard with the high-end configuration though.

Shame there’s no 17” yet, but I’ll be looking forward to seeing how they update it in January.

One of the other things Apple design beautifully are their retail stores. They recently opened stores in Beijing and Sydney, and they both are on par with the standards in architecture and design set by their stores in the US and EU.

Apple Store Regent Street, London