It's amazing to me that an 8-year-old Mac (with SSD, I'm assuming) feels just as fast as the latest and greatest.
From the emergence of personal computers in the late 70s through to the early 2000's computer performance was pretty much doubling every couple of years. The Apple II had a 1
Megahertz 8-bit processor, 5 years on, the first Mac had an 8 Megahertz processor that worked, internally, on 32 bit numbers and could tackle tasks that the Apple II couldn't even dream of. By the early 00s, clock speeds were being measured in
Gigahertz and multi-CPU systems were beginning to take off.
Some time in the early 80s, someone handed me a disc for my BBC Micro and - after clunking away for a minute - it displayed what was barely recognisable as a grainy, 5-second, silent, clip from Star Wars. 10 years later, you could just about watch the whole movie at slightly-worn VHS quality. Around 1990 I saw a demo of a "non-linear video editing" package running on ($10k+ worth of) personal computer hardware - you had to send the video away to be compressed on expensive magneto-optical discs, the quality was grotty, and the result wasn't an edited video, but an offline "edit decision list" which you could take into the "real" editing suite for the "online edit". 5 years later, a $200 add-on to a regular PC would let you capture and edit directly at "better-than VHS" quality. The rate of change was astounding.
From 1978 to the early 2000, if a personal computer system was 2 years old, it was completely outclassed performance-wise by the latest model. 5 years old and it would be an
order of magnitude behind new systems, which opened up whole new areas of application.
Sometime in the first decade of the 21st century, that rate of development and flood of new possibilities came to a shuddering halt. Computers had got
fast enough for most personal use - once you can do non-linear editing at 1080p and render the result over a coffee break there's not much more to offer the
consumer or the semi-pro making wedding videos or ads for local TV. The newest games were just 1996 games with higher resolution graphics.
Its hard to separate cause from effect. The whole "post-PC era" thing is a bit of a self-fulfilling myth - people still need PCs, and the reality is the "post-needing-a-new-PC-every-18-months" era - which was something of a rude awakening for PC makers. The idea that everybody actually wanted to switch to phones and tablets was a convenient one (especially when they came on 18-month contracts) - but it also diverted a lot of effort into making processors smaller and more power efficient, and on adapting applications for mobile use, so nothing much has been happening to PCs in the meantime. The new "killer app" is implanting dumbed-down versions of last century's apps and games on mobile platforms, adding a pinch of social networking and charging a subscription fee or flogging in-app purchases.
Still - in my experience, although you can't deny the success of "mobile", most people who actually produce "stuff" produce it on PCs, even if they tweet about it on their mobile.
I've recently bought an iMac not because I desperately needed the ~50% speed increase over my 2011 MBP but because (a) the circumstances that led me to buy a laptop instead of a desktop have changed, (b) whatever the merits of the new MBPs I don't see them as "desktop replacements" and (c) sooner or later the GPU in my MBP is likely to fail again, and this time it won't get fixed for free. Also, things like lack of USB3 and wanting multiple external displays - but that could be fixed with a few Thunderbolt devices if (c) didn't make me reluctant to invest more in the old system.
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I miss the startup chime.
Absolutely. Why, Apple, Why? I get that the glowing Mac logo on the MBPs may have been an unavoidable casualty of changes to the LCD panel design, but the startup chime...?
I upgraded to the extended keyboard and love it.
Still trying to decide if I prefer the new extended keyboard or the old (wired) extended keyboard (which I really, really like) - but its close. Its certainly not the train wreck of the 1st-gen "butterfly" keyboard on the rMB, and doesn't have that hollow spacebar "clonk" of the new MBP keyboard (which otherwise felt OK to me). Not sure why it needed to change, though. It's certainly never going to appeal to the full-travel with branded keyswitches you-can-take-my-model-M-from-my-cold-dead-fingers brigade, though.
Also, why the total lack of effort to support Touch ID/Touchbar - both for iMac users and MBP users who use an external display and keyboard on the desk?
Also went with the Magic Touchpad 2 and finding it to not be a big upgrade from the original version. It is nice that it is slightly larger and has rechargeable battery but I don't care for the white color (same for the keyboard) and I find it a little difficult to drag and drop files
I'd recommend enabling 3-finger drag - now buried at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a room with a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard" (or, more accurately System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Mouse & Trackpad -> Trackpad options).
As for the colour of the Magic Trackpad 2... it's hardly a big deal but, seriously, what were they thinking? To my eyes it doesn't match the keyboard, even with the white keys. The trackpads on all the current MacBooks - and the old Magic Trackpad - all match the surround, not the keycaps, and look much better for it.
The fast tracking stuff is a bit of BS though, everything is split up into different departments at Apple, one for technical support, one for orders, one for returns and one for distributions, and they have major issues talking with each other (and the different departments can't look into each others systems). I was promised express delivery only to get standard (delayed shipping by four days), my third machine is being built (supposedly fast tracked) right now, hoping it will get the correct shipping, but I won't hold my breath...
