Ok, that's strange. I on my side with my MBA 13 2013 (i5, 8GB RAM) have a better expierence with the latest OS Updates than with the one it was shipped with (Mavericks, I think). I don't think, that this will be a problem, too. On the other hand, sometimes a clean install will bringt more power to your book than an update. Of course, make a clean install each year is not funny at all...
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How Productive is the Macbook?
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I've received my 12" MacBook today and I'm positively surprised.
Keyboard is great so far, allthough I'm not at 100% speed yet.
The new force touch trackpad is okay. Can't see the great advantage over the old one, but nothing to criticize.
Everyday performance is fine, but I haven't tried compiling in Xcode yet.
Keyboard is great so far, allthough I'm not at 100% speed yet.
The new force touch trackpad is okay. Can't see the great advantage over the old one, but nothing to criticize.
Everyday performance is fine, but I haven't tried compiling in Xcode yet.
Another Morrowind fan!
I...I like you
LOL, yeah Morrowind runs really nice on this system. The only issue so far is that the caps lock key doesn't seem to work for toggling run/walk mode. Holding left shift lets you run of course so not a deal breaker. This may be a Wine issue though, and I haven't taken much time to play around with keybinding configuration.
MaBook: $1599
Morrowind: $20
Exploring Vvardenfell on a gold laptop? Priceless!
The thread is named "how productive is the Macbook" and you are talking about using Morrowind - gosh, I love it!!!
I started this thread asking for opinions.
I have now got a MB and I have to say after using it for about 5 days now, I run everything on it perfectly.
Couldn't be happier. Sitting in the garden now. Most productive I have been in ages.
I have now got a MB and I have to say after using it for about 5 days now, I run everything on it perfectly.
Couldn't be happier. Sitting in the garden now. Most productive I have been in ages.
Well, succeeding in Morrowind requires some effort.The thread is named "how productive is the Macbook" and you are talking about using Morrowind - gosh, I love it!!!
I mean, if raiding the vaults at Ghostgate, then the vaults of the great houses in Vivec, then selling all that phat lewt to either the mudcrab or the Creeper can't be called productivity, I don't know what can.
Not too small at all. Side by side I have my MBP and my MB and more or less everything fits on the same with it being ever so slightly smaller on the MB.
In fact I have Unity open with a ton of panels and windows, happily creating games and software.
The screen is a fine size. Being retina makes a huge difference.
Mine is not at all productive. I had hoped it would do dishes and a little light housework, but it's just sitting there running Migration Assistant. Useless!!
Mine is not at all productive. I had hoped it would do dishes and a little light housework, but it's just sitting there running Migration Assistant. Useless!!
Sounds like it's glitching. Mines making the bed right now, whilst spinning plates.
It turned out to be worse than I though. It wasn't even running Migration Assistant. After 36 hours I finally cancelled it, and updated the new MB manually. Probably just as well, apparently I had a lot of bloat on my MBP. I do love my new baby even if it doesn't do housework.
Can it play through the Helena Beat demo first try without any stuttering or error message?
If so, that would be wonderful.
Sounds hyperbolic. I've noticed zero performance drops in my MBP which shipped with Mountain Lion.
OS updates aren't going to kill your MacBook. If anything future updates will focus on making it more efficient with retina graphics and fanless chips.
Also in the camp that upgraded to this from the 11" MBA. As my primary work machine, it has been everything I expected and more. 3 instances of Safari open simultaneously with 4-5 tabs each, 1 Chrome with 3-4 tabs, several Numbers, Keynote, Excel, Word, and Pages files open as well, Mail App, iMessage, Notes - works beautifully, and coming from the 11" MBA, the screen feels luxurious and spacious in comparison. Productivity-wise, I've never been more.
I have absolutely zero complaints. The keyboard and trackpad are both awesome, the speakers better than anything I've heard on an Apple laptop to date, and it is smaller and weighs less than a 12.9" iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard.
I have absolutely zero complaints. The keyboard and trackpad are both awesome, the speakers better than anything I've heard on an Apple laptop to date, and it is smaller and weighs less than a 12.9" iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard.
Lucky you
I keep restoring the OS every year. Almost at the end of its cycle (9-12 months) Every OS become stable and comparable in performances with the predecessor. At the moment, the speed is ok in El Capitan, the only problem is the battery life way below Yosemite (battery is new, recently replaced in warranty).
I'm still quite concerned about future updates, especially from the software side. A general increase of performances of all Mac but the MacBook will leave the underpowered tiny machine behind. I don't want to imagine how the new Office version will be handled by the MB, since this one already sucks.
Anything beyond Mavericks was unusable on my 2010 13" MBA. Things like Mission Control would take 3-5 seconds to respond, whereas with earlier OSs it was pretty much instantaneous. Battery life was barely 2 hours and fans came on much more frequently than before. And I always did clean installs as well, so it wasn't due to clutter in the OS from upgrades.
Of course that doesn't mean future upgrades will kill the MacBook. My MBA was one of the last Core 2 Duo Macs so that likely played a role with optimisation, but at least in my experience OS X tends to get heavier by a bit in every upgrade.
Maybe that was because of the amount of memory you had. Or because of the graphics performance of the MBA, because everything beyond Mavericks is using the GPU for UI rendering, as far as I know. Or did Mavericks already started using the GPU? And be able to use a more "powerful" GPU (as long as we can use the word "powerful" for the integrated GPUs), developers stop to think about an outdated system.
I remember, that the first OS X update I got, after buying my MBA early 2013 (i5, 8GB), had improved a lot the speed and responsiveness of the system. And until today no OS X version released let me think that my MBA was too slow. It even gets better and better and I never made a clean install, always just updated. Even now, where it has a water damage and with that a throttled CPU (IA:0,8 GHz, GT 0,2 GHz, fixed, no more turbo boost; Geekbench 3 32Bit benchmark single-core: 824, multi-core: 1695), the UI is still acceptable, some things like mission control, launch pad are perfectly smooth, others like animated menus and switching spaces could have a little lag from time to time. The overall processing performance is like a time travel, but still usable (I’m using OS X El Captain). Finally, that’s impressing that a 800MHz CPU is fast enough to still have a usable system and a little training of patience for installing / starting apps.
My experience (with OS X and iOS devices): when you buy a system, you will be fine with the upcoming OS updates for at least the next 2-3 years. For OS X maybe 3-4 Years. And if computer system becomes outdated (but still usable) after 3-4 years, that will be ok, IMHO.
BTW., I think that when the time comes where the Macbook 2016 will be to slow for further OS updates, it really doesn't matter if you have the m3, m5 or m7 version.
Which new Office version? You probably won't get a major new version of Office for Mac for several years, the last one before this was Office 2011...Current version works great...for Office that is, huge improvement over 2011 anyway. Starting up the programs in the first place is the only hang up, and it is still better than 2011 ever was. Runs great on the rMB, sorry you appear to be having problems!Lucky you
I keep restoring the OS every year. Almost at the end of its cycle (9-12 months) Every OS become stable and comparable in performances with the predecessor. At the moment, the speed is ok in El Capitan, the only problem is the battery life way below Yosemite (battery is new, recently replaced in warranty).
I'm still quite concerned about future updates, especially from the software side. A general increase of performances of all Mac but the MacBook will leave the underpowered tiny machine behind. I don't want to imagine how the new Office version will be handled by the MB, since this one already sucks.
Office 2016
Word and Excel are draining the battery, even if they can handle App Nap. I was on a 10h flight last month with my MBPr 15 and I started writing a document in Word. The battery status indicated 3.5h left, at 100% charge. I promptly switched to Pages and TextEdit and I got 10 hours of battery left. The same is happening with the rMB. From 2.5 hours to 3.5 hours with 100% battery and Word/Excel open.
Current version does not work great unfortunately. There are A LOT of bugs, especially with double screen or when full screen. You are right that it is a significant improvement over the crappy 2011, but we are way beyond the Windows version. Running Excel on Parallels is a better experience than the native 2016 for Mac.
The second problematic app is also Box Sync. It consumes 20% of CPU every time is syncing, and if you are working on the cloud, this means that 20% of CPU is always occupied by the app.
Office 2016
Word and Excel are draining the battery, even if they can handle App Nap. I was on a 10h flight last month with my MBPr 15 and I started writing a document in Word. The battery status indicated 3.5h left, at 100% charge. I promptly switched to Pages and TextEdit and I got 10 hours of battery left. The same is happening with the rMB. From 2.5 hours to 3.5 hours with 100% battery and Word/Excel open.
Current version does not work great unfortunately. There are A LOT of bugs, especially with double screen or when full screen. You are right that it is a significant improvement over the crappy 2011, but we are way beyond the Windows version. Running Excel on Parallels is a better experience than the native 2016 for Mac.
The second problematic app is also Box Sync. It consumes 20% of CPU every time is syncing, and if you are working on the cloud, this means that 20% of CPU is always occupied by the app.
Yeah, while in principle Office 16 for Mac is great, in actual use you get mixed results. I really enjoy the design and most implementation decisions on the apps, but they are very buggy in my experience. Try to review track changes in word or actually create a semi-complex spreadsheet and it's all over the place.
I have a lot of qualms with MS, considering I haven't owned a MS product outside Windows in a VM since the Zune.I will say however that they support the hell out of their software products (except for mobile, lol) and their software really is an ever-improving work in progress. Nothing but respect for Microsoft software devs. Give it 2 years and I think Office 16 will be stellar.
However, for now, it's hard for me to recommend Office 16 over Office 11 for Mac if you're trying to actually be productive. I recently switched back to using Office 11 products with the exception of Outlook. Outlook 16 for Mac is great. Now to keep awaiting the Skype for Business Mac app.
While I can't give you any comparison with the MBA, I have a 15 inch non-retina MBP and have previously worked on both 12 inch and 14 inch Lenovo Thinkpads (old work).
This is by far the most pleasing machine I've worked on - also compared to my big 15 inch. I would much rather use this.
My home setup is with a 22 inch screen and an Apple bluetooth keyboard and mouse (awesome that i just plug in the USB-C when I get home and everything including printer, power etc. is on) but at the office I have no external mouse, keyboard or screen. I often sit here 6-8 hours depending on what meetings I have during the day and no time during the day do I feel that it's too small..
The keyboard is a bit of a religion apparently, but this is by far the best I've used - ever. The screen quality is amazing and I think thats the reason I'm not feeling it's too small.
So yes - I'm very productive every single day on this baby - the size of the screen really is okay to me, because of the awesome touchpad makes it easy to navigate with gestures between all windows or windows of the app you're using etc.
Love it.
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I use 2016 and have been nothing but impressed so far. Hated 2011 and always felt it was a way inferior version to the PC Office suite (well actually all Mac versions have been so far to be honest) but must say I really really like 2016 - Grated it might be that I don't use advanced features that are missing/buggy but the basics really work! I have been on board since December and it's been getting some pretty big updates a couple of times already, so will agree with you, they really do make it better all the time (heard from a friend that Outlook was pretty unusable to him at release but good now)
Interesting, I haven't noticed the battery hogging. I do use office sparingly, as Numbers is my preferred spreadsheet app (much prefer the object oriented nature of it as opposed to Excel) but it is open several times during the work day, although I do shut it down every time I am done with a file, don't usually have it sitting idle. Also have a Dropbox business account, as well as Dropbox Encore for my personal account running at all times. I get battery life good enough to not even bring my charger with me anymore, even for full days out at clients, where it gets 8+ hours of virtually continuous use. It's not that I'm purposely trying to save battery either, I just dislike Office enough that I don't like having it open unless I have to. That doesn't really contradict my previous post, though - I've found 2016 to be leaps and bounds better than 2011 - I just don't run anything MS unless I absolutely have to. RDP and Office is it, and sparinglyOffice 2016
Word and Excel are draining the battery, even if they can handle App Nap. I was on a 10h flight last month with my MBPr 15 and I started writing a document in Word. The battery status indicated 3.5h left, at 100% charge. I promptly switched to Pages and TextEdit and I got 10 hours of battery left. The same is happening with the rMB. From 2.5 hours to 3.5 hours with 100% battery and Word/Excel open.
Current version does not work great unfortunately. There are A LOT of bugs, especially with double screen or when full screen. You are right that it is a significant improvement over the crappy 2011, but we are way beyond the Windows version. Running Excel on Parallels is a better experience than the native 2016 for Mac.
The second problematic app is also Box Sync. It consumes 20% of CPU every time is syncing, and if you are working on the cloud, this means that 20% of CPU is always occupied by the app.
Yes, with Apple stock apps (Pages, Keynote and Numbers), the battery is really preserved. Unfortunately if you have to collaborate with people or generate massive spreadsheets, they are pretty useless. Keynote instead is my favourite Apple software. I still cannot find anything that good to make presentations, and it get even better with Infographics (from MAS).
I just did a test with Affinity Designer on the rMB m3. It is quite surprising. It can run smoothly 600 dpi A4 with multiple images in it (like figures in scientific papers). Very, very nice. Even more debated on whether to return it or not.