Apple held its Apple Watch event today, but despite all the hype, the two most exciting announcements had nothing to do with the Apple Watch. I want to start the announcement that excited me the most, even though the general public won’t care all that much: ResearchKit. ResearchKit combines the iPhone and HealthKit to allow iPhone owners to participate in medical research.
This may sound like something trivial, but anyone who has ever done any serious scientific research – medical or otherwise – knows how hard it is to find enough quality participants. ResearchKit will allow users to opt-in into medical research programs, so you can collect data through your iPhone and send it straight to researchers. They can then use this data to aid in research for conditions like diabetes or breast cancer.
In addition – and this is hugely important – Apple announced that it will release ResearchKit as open source, so that other platforms can participate in this endeavour too. In other words, Android or Windows Phone users could install applications to aid medical research as well, assuming developers implement support for it. I’m really hoping the big players – Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. – come together to make sure this is a proper open standard, implemented on all the major smartphone platforms.
Cancer has had a huge impact on my life – even though I – thank the goddess – have never had cancer, I’ve had people close to me and my family die all around me ever since I can remember. I’ve seen families torn apart by it, I’ve seen people fight through it to live another day (like my mother), and I’ve seen people suffer horrendous pain. In fact, I’m sure we all have.
However, I’ve also seen what medical research has done for those suffering from cancer. Even a few years can make a huge difference – breast cancer treatment today is better than it was only a few years ago. And of course, while my personal frame of reference is cancer, there are countless other horrible diseases that could benefit greatly from more and easier research participation.
So yes, this was, at least for me, as a human being who cares about the people around him, the most significant and most important part of today’s event. I’m setting my cynical self aside for a second, and I’m really hoping the industry gets behind this as quickly as possible. Please.
That being said, on to new products. Apple announced a new MacBook that’s crazy thin, has a fancy new keyboard, and a nice new touchpad. It’s only 0.92kg, 13.1mm thick, and has a 12″ 2304×1440 display, and comes in silver, blackish-silver and gold. The specifications are a bit disappointing, though: a 1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core M with Intel HD Graphics 5300. It’s got 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD (configurable to 512GB). Best thing: it’s completely fanless.
The keyboard replaces the scissor mechanism with a butterfly one, which sounds like marketing nonsense, but actually makes sense. Whereas scissor hinges causes keys to wobble upon keypress, the butterfly gine has a more uniform keypress. I’ll have to try it out to see if it translates into actual benefit, but it sure does look like it. Similarly, the touchpad has been redone as well, and now implements Apple’s confusing force touch stuff from the Apple Watch. I think a force touch is a harder press, but I still have no clue.
All in all, this looks like a fantastic, if not underpowered laptop – until you hit the price. The price is very hefty – $1549 in the US, and ^a'not1449 in the EU. No thanks.
Lastly, we have the Apple Watch. Apple essentially just redid the demo from late last year, showing very little new information or functionality. Basically, take any Android Wear device, add the ability to answer calls on the device itself, make the software more complicated and the UI uglier and messier, add several hundreds of dollars or euros to the price, and you’ve got yourself an Apple Watch. In other words, dangerously close to that Tizen Samsung Gear thing nobody wanted.
Apple had one job this evening: tell us why we want an Apple Watch. Tell us why we should spend at least $349/^a'not399 (the price of the small version of the cheapest model), all the way up to ^a'not17000 (the most expensive gold model) for a gadget so we have to take our phone out of our pockets slightly less often. The cold and harsh truth is that Apple failed to answer that question – what they showed us was a very complicated, finnicky device with an incredibly hefty price tag (only the garish aluminium/rubber small models are $349/^a'not399 – the better-looking models are all around ^a'not900-^a'not1000).
You don’t have to believe me – take it from The Verge’s Nilay Patel, not exactly a vocal Apple critic, who actually tried the device out after the event.
That’s sort of the defining theme of the Apple Watch so far: it’s nicer than I expected and I’m sure the confusing interface settles down into a familiar pattern after you use it for a while, but I’m still not sure why you’d want to put this thing on your wrist all the time. Apple’s big task at this event was convincing people that a use case for the Watch exists, and at this moment it still feels like an awful lot of interesting ideas without a unifying theme. We’ll have to wait until we get review units in hand and spend way more time with one to really understand the value of the Apple Watch.
The device is riddled with unintuitive and arbitrary UI conventions, and just as I predicted when the device was first announced, Patel states it feels disjointed and confusing. This is by no means a surprise to me, but it is a surprise for a first-gen Apple product. The iPod, the first iPhone, the iPad – they were all quite intuitive and easy to grasp, but the Watch, clearly, seems not to be so.
This is a matter of taste, of course, but the applications Apple showed didn’t look particularly nice, either. Words like garish, information overload, cramped come to mind. Android Wear is already confusing and cumbersome at times due to the small screen, and Apple is cramming a lot more functionality and user interface in that same space. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that’s not going to be easy to use. All in all, nor this event, nor the first hands-on reports seem to allay my initial concerns about the confusing and cumbersome UI.
Apple promises “all-day” battery life of 18 hours, which is less than what I get out of my Moto 360 (two days easy, three days with effort), and more or less forces daily charging. It’ll be available in select countries starting in April.
I don’t understand what market Apple’s going for with this new Macbook. Sure it may be fanless, though I find that particular value to be over-rated with how quiet laptop fans are these days, but it has lower specs than the entry-level Macbook Air, is rated to get exactly the same battery life as that air, and yet costs $400 more than the Air? I don’t get it. Sure it’s got a Retina screen, but you’re sure as hell not going to be doing any photo or video editing on that thing. Basically it’s a tablet (which is what Core M was meant for) in a laptop form factor that costs $400 more than Apple’s lowest tier real laptop. I don’t get it at all, and you know full well that as resource hungry as Yosemite is it’s going to run slow as mud on a machine that under-powered.
Personally, I find retina screens more important for text rendering. As a sometime writer, I’d love a silent laptop with a great screen, good keyboard and an SSD. In fact, I’ve already got one (until the fan turns on, which it does only rarely).
My main concern would be that although the ‘fanless design’ sounds nice there is the issue of heat and the problems recently of prematurely dying GPU’s on both the iMac and MacBook Pro range (2010, 2011, and 2012) because the constrained environment which Apple has decided as being more important than ensuring that there is wiggle room when it comes to thermal limits (the ability to disperse the heat in a way that doesn’t result in high temperatures for too long thus reducing the life expectancy of the hardware) makes me concerned whether this is an example of form taking priority over function.
There is also the issue of performance and to be honest over the years the GPU drivers have been average at best and to a large extent there doesn’t seem to be the same emphasis on optimising as there has been back in the PowerPC days. The CPU/GPU in the MacBook might be good enough on paper but if the operating system itself isn’t optimised for that hardware then it’ll be a situation of an otherwise OK experience being undermined by poorly optimised software.
But it is $1299, not $1549:
http://www.macrumors.com/2015/03/09/apple-new-macbook-2015/
Edited 2015-03-09 20:47 UTC
Which is still far too much given how under-powered it is. There is a model at the higher price point as well, though the only difference I can see is the size of the SSD. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that’s a more obvious rip-off. You literally pay more to get much less.
You know it’s a dud when a Verge headline doesn’t contain a superlative. I don’t think they’ve every taken an interest in something without finding it to be the most interesting thing of all time.
I don’t remember seeing the open source part about ResearchKit, but I didn’t follow too closely. That’s great to hear since it sounded like a great idea, but I was worrying about whether an Apple-only program would give an appropriately random sample.
If it is open source, then it shouldn’t even need to Google to support it, right? Of course, it would need devices to have the requisite sensors, so it still needs some support, but I don’t see any reason third-parties couldn’t port the software. And I don’t think there’s any need to fear Samsung or LG holding back on sensors.
The new Macbook reminds me of nothing so much as the Chromebook Pixel. Impressive in a totally pointless way. The battery stuff (forgot what they called it, layering?) seemed cool, but no idea how useful it is in practice.
Wish Apple presenters would learn a few more adjectives. “Unbelievable” and “incredible” are fine words, but they’re not the only ones.
This better happen. I hope it doesn’t turn into another Facetime which was promised to become an open protocol and never did.
New Macbook looks awesome. Totally fanless is great and it seems to be the next jump for the Air line with some genuinely nice enhancements. Weird that they didn’t call it the MacBook air though. It is way more compelling than the original Air and that created a whole new market.
Apple Watch… Well it’s not for me, although I can see how some parts would be useful. I’m not a watch wearer and I’m not about to start now just so I can see some notifications.
Edited 2015-03-09 21:36 UTC
I wonder if the Apple iWatch is a ‘false flag’ device – intentionally misleading the market into a wild goose chase, while they develop the iGoggles (or iGlasses, or whatever name for the augmented reality doodad they are working on).
The iWatch is not a compelling device, and I would hope that Apple is smart enough to know it.
You know that sounds absolutely crazy, right?
The new Macbook’s pretty neat in my opinion, especially the new trackpad and fanless cooling. Personally I’d be more interested in an update to the MacBook Pro though.
If they could make the next version of the Pro a bit quieter under load it’d be much appreciated. No, I’m not expected a more powerful laptop to be super quiet, let alone fanless, but I’ve noticed how much louder my 15″ MacBook Pro is than certain other laptops I’ve used. Using Lightroom it can get noisy enough to annoy other people working in the same room.
They updated the pro as well. New processors, and the 13″ has the new trackpad.
Thanks. I missed that in the coverage.
It doesn’t look like they’ve updated the 15″ Pro at all; its spec looks identical to when I bought mine last year. Maybe they’re still waiting for newer quad core i7 CPUs before releasing a new version…
It’s thinner! And lighter! And it matches your new iPhone!
The new trackpad sounds kinda cool, but I’m wondering why they thought it’d be a good idea to go with a single USB Type-C port.
That’s it. Well, that, and a headphone jack. No charging port – that’s handled by the single USB Type-C port – no HDMI, no nothing.
But, hey, if you’re the type of person who’s inner 11-year-old giggles at the word “dongle,” then this laptop might be for you!
Yeah gotta wonder at that. You would think charging + 1 port for data out would be the absolute minimum. I can’t believe that 2 USB C ports would have compromised the design fundamentally.
Edited 2015-03-09 23:34 UTC
This device is going to be used like a MacPro…a clean device with a dozen cables hanging out of it if you want to get any work done. I was already annoyed with the 1 USB3 port of a Surface Pro 3 but now I have to chose between connecting a USB-Disk or charging my machine? And forget about attaching an external monitor. Basically, there are going to be cables/hubs/splitters everywhere
I am wondering why everyone keeps mentioning how incredibly thin this device is. Compared to a Surface Pro 3 it is thick and heavy. Even with a typecover attached SP3 only becomes the same size/weight but is much more powerful, cheaper, has touch and well, connectivity.
A 1.1 Ghz Dual Core M that starts at Euro 1449? Let me repeat that. DUAL Core 1.1 Ghz! And no, those 5th generation Core M’s are NOT speedy
But… but… Surface Pro 3 has a fan!
THAT MEANS SOMETHING TO SOMEONE SOMEWHERE!!!
The guts of the new MacBook do look kinda cool, though. It’s nearly all batteries.
Here’s what it looks like with the batteries removed:
http://bit.ly/1Hq1A2F
“This may sound like something trivial, but anyone who has ever done any serious scientific research – medical or otherwise – knows how hard it is to find enough quality participants.”
The actual problem is finding enough people with the right medical history. Harvesting data from random people is totally useless.
“ResearchKit will allow users to opt-in into medical research programs, so you can collect data through your iPhone and send it straight to researchers. They can then use this data to aid in research for conditions like diabetes or breast cancer.”
In fact it will just provide a lot of completely irrelevant data.
Medical researchers typically need things like urine and blood samples not heart rate checks. Clinical trials may require a patient to spend several weeks confined to a clinic with regular monitoring.
Researchkit sounds like another geek driven idea with no input from actual researchers.
Didn’t Steve Jobs hate netbooks?
Since most of the posts here about the 12 inch Macbook will invariably be either “Its awesome! Apple FTW” or “Its stupid stupid stupid”, I thought a comparison from an actual daily user of an 11 inch Air might be welcome – since imo this is in reality an upgrade to the 11 inch (in some ways at least). If this bothers the Windows users in the audience stop reading…
First off, if you use and like a 13 inch Air or Pro, or really any other 13 inch or larger laptop and are happy with its size, this one probably isn’t for you. Its really simple, there is a significant physical trade-off going south of 13 inches in screen size and keyboard/trackpad layout that many people cannot stomach. Apple seems to have reduced it some, but it is still there to a degree. They may be able to convert a few 13 inch users, but overall I would say this is more about being a better compromise to get to “tablet size” physically than the existing 11 inch Air (at least in physical layout and screen size).
Personally I think Dell did a bit better with their XPS 13 as far as cramming things into “tablet size” in so far as attracting users of bigger laptops to “go small”. I kind of wish that thing ran OSX, but that is a different story
So anyway limiting the comparison to an 11 inch Air, whats changed (other than silly stuff like being available in gold):
1. Consolidation to a single USB type-C port for everything.
2. Slightly bigger screen (0.4 inches diagonal).
3. Better AR (16:10 instead of 16:9).
4. HiDP resolution (i.e. retina).
5. Bigger keys in slightly tighter layout.
6. New key mechanism (better? don’t know – will have to see)
7. Each key has its own backlight.
8. New trackpad with some neat tricks up it’s sleeve.
9. Lost about a third of a pound in weight.
10. Almost exactly the same physical size (it lost .4 inches in width and is a hair thinner, but gained about .2 inches in depth). It should still fit in most bags made for 11 inch laptops or big tablets I would think.
11. No fan
12. No more 4GB option (thankfully)
13. Somewhat slower processor choices.
14. Costs quite a bit more.
So everyone elses big question seems to be aobut the single USB port. Is that a big compromise to me (relative to an 11 inch Air)? Nope. Its not even a small one. I use an 11 inch every single day, it is my main work machine. If you are someone who is constantly plugging in multiple USB devices while on the go I don’t understand why you would want this thing (or an Air for that matter). I actually like the idea of one port – that means when I park this thing at work all I need to do is plug in the port replicator and I’m done – its one less port to have to deal with. I understand some people’s objections, but I am pretty much the target audience for this thing…
So what’s wrong with it? Honestly I have 3 gripes, but until I put hands on one I won’t know if I’m going to buy one of these or not:
1. Is the performance hit noticeable with the somewhat slower clockspeed, and will it overheat when used under heavy load? This is my big one. I’m not going to accept much of a regression here, as I don’t feel I am getting much in return for it. Ill probably opt to go with the smaller SSD but upgrade the CPU – if that doesn’t at least put me where I am now performance wise Ill skip it.
2. It is listed with exactly the same battery life as the 11 inch Air. I can live with that, but the screen better blow me away, because with the same screen as the old 11 inch Air (which I have learned to live with comfortably) I’m pretty sure I would have gotten another 2 or 3 hours out of this hardware… In short the screen better be exceptionally good.
3. Is the keyboard weird? I really like the keyboard on my 11 inch Air… I’m not sure about this change, some of the reviews seemed to see it as a regression…
I’m not really listing price as a problem, because to be fair this is about what I expected it would cost. My 11 inch Air costs $1350 right now (with my options), but it was quite a bit more than that when I bought it (I think right around $1500). This will end up running within a hundred or so US to the same price, just with a much better screen.
In short, I’m intrigued but not blown away… Well see.
I use a macbook pro as my desktop at work and take it home every day. I currently plug the following in when I get to work:
– Power
– USB 3 Hub (mouse, keyboard)/Ethernet adapter combo
– Displayport for one monitor
– HDMI for the second monitor
So I have a nice dual monitor setup with 2 spare USB ports for random things.
Would be great to have a dock with just one USB C connection, but can one USB C port be able to drive 2 monitors and ethernet and USB mouse/keyboard?
USB3.1 is 10 Gbit/s. It depends on the resolution on your screens and the kind of compression that can be used on it. A full HD uncompressed signal would be 1920 * 1080 * 32 * 60 = roughly 3.8 Gbit/s. So 10 Gbit should (theoretically) be just enough to give you 2 times full HD with some networking and keyboard and mouse.
Which MacBook has both DP and HDMI?
2014 retina MacBook pro 13″. Two Thunderbolt ports (aka displayport) and one full size HDMI
I hope I’m wrong here, but does having this lone USB-C port mean that you can’t charge this MacBook and have it charge your iDevice simultaneously? I haven’t really dug deep into all the press releases and specsheets, but that’s the message I’m getting. If so, wouldn’t that be a major turn-off even for the most hardcore Apple ecosystem user?
Edited 2015-03-10 14:25 UTC
Yes, that is what it means. You can either charge the laptop (using the port as input) or charge something from the laptop (using the port as output) but not both at the same time. Of course there are going to be workarounds (hubs/converters/splitters) but those are going to be extra costs and take up extra space and look ugly.
Another solution would be the way Surface Pro does this. It includes a USB-charging port on the charger so you can plug in your phone/tablet/bluetooth mouse. It is purely for charging, no datatransfer. But then again, Surface Pro also has a normal USB-Port and a Display Port so you don’t need any adapters.
The lack of ports on this thing, the slow CPU and the high price make this machine very undesirable which is too bad because it looks great and does pretty well in every other aspect
While that is theoretically possible, it doesn’t work on the new Macbook (or any of the existing Airs either). To my knowledge Apple configures their hardware to only allow a single DisplayPort signal per port. Since the Airs and the new Macbook have only a single external port capable of carrying a displayPort signal, they are limited to a single external monitor.
The Macbook Pro, having 2 Thunderbolt ports + HDMI, can do this, but not the Airs or the new Macbook.
The watch…
When you see the giant screens of the keynote it all looks big enough, but when you see Nilay Patel (in the video linked in the article) try to make a phone call and failing every time because he cannot hit the tiny icon…that is going to be a problem.
Also, every time he scrolled the vein in his hand got pushed around and when he tried to push the “friends” button it looked really uncomfortable. All those tiny icons in the icon-cloud…no way. And all those tap-actions on the crown…nothing intuitive about this device.
This is going to be an extremely high margin product for Apple. Those bands are just…WOW…way over the top
All of this is priced like pretty high-end phones but cannot do anything without such a phone and will have to be bought with carrier subsidies? I thought Apple would sell ten million of these just because, well, hype. But this looks like a “nope, not this gen” product
Completely baffled by the claims of it being unintuitive and confusing.
Swipe down for notifications, same as iOS. Swipe up for glances. Swipe left/right to browse glances (with the now ubiquitous dot dot dot indicator to show how many glances you have and your current position). Side button is dedicated to accessing Messaging and Apple Pay quickly. Crown acts as Home button and scroller/selector/zoom in context. Touch works in standard way with standard targets; force touch brings up additional configuration or context menus where applicable. Done. Are we still confused?
Because it’s really no more complex than iOS (swipe down for notifications, swipe up for control center, double-tap Home for multitasking, long-press Home for Siri, etc).
Edited 2015-03-10 03:48 UTC
I love the aggressive innovation. But Yoga 3 and Pebble are probably still better :{
Apple Watch is drawer material. I’ll get it and play around with it, then I’ll feed the drawer.
What a stupid product category, considering we all carry phones with a big-ass screen with usable keyboards.
Say what you will … but apple has really taken a nosedive since the passing of Steve.
The “quality” of yosemite, even more ridiculous pricing on iphones, the recent lack of any true innovation, friggin … iwatch.
I really used to be a fan of their hardware, but the last macbook i bought is an i7 17″. I bought it on the day that they announced the discontinuation of the 17″ model.
I need screen real-estate to do my work. I use a tiling wm to maximize efficiency, and a 17 inch screen allows me to fit more on a screen while still being able to read it.
IMHO, retina is a gimmick. Do you really need 8 trillion DPI? Personally, i don’t care. I use my machine for work, and a 15″ screen isn’t cutting it. I need screen real estate and a tiling wm. What use is the massive resolution to me if i have to sit hunched over squinting at a terminal window? Or i could always choose to negate any gains brought on by that massive density and scale everything up to ridiculous heights, which seems to be what everyone is doing with this high tech gift of cataract inducing screens.
It kills batteries, taxes cpus and gpus, and the net result is scaling artifacts, because even now, years after the introduction of retina screens, shit still don’t work right, and things have to be scaled by the OS, and programs have to be fooled to render right.
As for the new macbook. Tablet hardware in a nice chassis. No way that’s worth the asking price. Given how badly yosemite performs even on an i7, i don’t think this will be a pleasant experience.
Without innovation, all that is left in their products is design. It just ain’t cutting it.
Look at the lineup …
Each time they replace something in lineup, it ends up being weird and somewhat unbecoming of apple. By the time all of the jobs-era stuff is gone, they’ll be struggling to stay relevant.
All IMHO of course …
While that rant is a good way to get modded up on osnews, the market disagrees. It seems apple is going in directions that people want. Apple watch is unknown at this point.
Regarding Yosemite, the wells started to come off before Steve Jobs died but he was able to manage the public perception of OS X a lot better than Tim Cook could given that Tim Cook is more of a traditional CEO where as Steve Jobs would get involved with the day to day operations. I also believe there was still an element of Apple being the ‘plucky underdog’ where bugs were overlooked because they were still fighting the uphill battle but at some point people will stop overlooking those bugs and start wondering why these issues haven’t been addressed. I’ve said it many times on my own blog that Apple needs to go out, employ 100 programmers and all they do is sleep, eat and drink hunting down bugs and fixing them – that includes reading through the Mozilla bugzilla for the mountain of Appkit bugs, talking to third parties such as Bare Bones Software who has had one hell of a time updating the code for BBEdit to address a long standing font related bug. Microsoft for example has been contending with a bug in Core Graphics that they’ve reported yet has not been resolved yet – a tier one software vendor should be getting Apple making sure that life is made as easy as possible as to promote a richer ecosystem of third party applications.
I agree with most of what you said especially regarding the recent price increases of the iPhone the high end iPhone 6 128GB has gone from NZ$1349 to $1599 (incl. GST) and it’ll be interesting to see whether these price increases will have an impact on sales especially in the light of the HTC One M9 and Samsung Galaxy S6 being launched which will be interesting to see whether HTC and Samsung pass along increases like what Apple has done.
For me I started using Apple products around 10 years ago with my first eMac but even someone like me who has apologised for Apple’s decisions has come to the stage that Apple appears to be going in one direction and where I want to go is in another. I’m sure Apple will thrive but long term the decisions they make now will come back and bite them in the backside if they’re not too careful.