Confessions of an Apple Virgin
Stymied by her old laptop, our IT guru(ess) has found herself beguiled by Apple’s latest 2015 MacBook Pro Retina
Review by Tammy Orr
Some weeks ago, after a weird chain of events, I found myself the unlikely owner of a brand new, 2015 MacBook Pro with a 13.5” retina screen. I say unlikely because I use computers all the time, but I chose to live without an Apple product in the house since 1998.
Months previously, I’d been the (almost equally unlikely) owner of a brand new, 2015 Lenovo laptop with Windows 10 and an identical price tag. According to the numbers, the Lenovo was a more powerful machine than the MacBook. It had a huge, 4k resolution screen, a faster processor, more memory, and a bigger hard drive. It was also considerably heavier, but that’s how it is with big-screen laptops. When the Lenovo was about three weeks old, I was typing away at it on my desk and heard a loud, worrying click inside it. It powered down, and wouldn’t power up again.
This was normal, said the people who repair new Lenovo laptops. They further informed me the soldering work around the battery had turned out to be rotten on this model. I was horrified-the price tag was staggering for something carelessly crafted.
I took the Lenovo back to the store for repairs. The store promptly lost the Lenovo, and never found it. Then I learned this Lenovo model was not only soldered poorly-it was also popular, and backordered, and the store didn’t know when they’d have more in stock. Eventually, they offered me another machine of equal value, meaning I could pick a different Windows 10 model or a somewhat low-end MacBook Pro.
I considered how my shoulder still ached from lugging around the heavy Lenovo and its even heavier power supply. I considered how loud and hot it had been, how short its battery, and how beautiful its screen-except when displaying the colour yellow. I’d never realised how much I enjoyed looking at the colour yellow, until the Lenovo taught me. It was practically my favourite colour now. Nearly everyone I asked told me to man up about the shoulder and the yellow-and please don’t feed Apple by buying a filthy MacBook.
I bought the MacBook.
Unboxing it was a far more special experience than it should have been. Normally, new computers are kind of slapped into an ugly box with too much small print, confused branding, and a bunch of smelly, inky documents that demand to be read, but will never fold back into the same shape again. MacBooks are, apparently, not normal computers. Every delightful, minimalist, perfectly engineered piece in the box was emblazoned “Made by Apple in California.”
I slipped the computer out of its nest, crafted with such thoughtful care by Apple in California. I started to wonder what I’d done. I would be using this computer for a very long time, and it had a gigantic light-up Apple logo on it. The logo would fill any room with branding whenever the machine was powered on.
I feel assaulted by branding, which is one reason I don’t care much for Apple. I stick electrical tape over branding on electronics, cut it out of clothes, and dream of filling my life with objects having no need to announce their maker or intended audience. Since I’d started debating whether to get a MacBook, a primary concern was how I would eliminate its logo from my life. In the end, I’ve had to decide to ignore it. At least I cannot actually see it myself when I’m using the machine-only other people can.
The first thing I learned after unboxing my way through the lovely bits of box made by Apple in California was that the MacBook is, as expected, nice and light. As an American, I was particularly delighted to find the pound sterling, dollar and euro symbols on the keyboard, side by side. (This means a lot less typing Alt+6556, for me!) The next thing I learned is that the laptop itself is covered in nice, smooth, cool materials that are utterly impervious to fingerprints.
My previous Lenovo laptop had been covered hopelessly in filthy-looking fingerprints from the first moment I touched it. When it broke, the man who received it from me at the shop looked like 1) he really didn’t want to touch it and 2) he wanted to lecture me about hand-washing. He glared as he made a note on the receipt. ‘Condition: poor. Reasons: fingerprints.’ I had never met a computer with that problem and didn’t know what to do about it. Wiping only made it worse.
The MacBook said its battery would be empty and it needed to charge fully before I powered it on. So I plugged it in, expecting to wait overnight. Thirty minutes later, it was full. How exciting. I broke don’t-eat-at-the-computer protocol and powered it up during dinner.
And I immediately dropped a vegetarian Cumberland-style sausage on it. Onlookers gasped in disgust and horror, and time seemed to slow as the sausage rolled and bounced its way onto every possible surface of the MacBook: the screen, the keyboard, the touchpad, and the case generally. “Wow. Oops.” I sheepishly scooped the vegetarian sausage off the MacBook. Everyone leaned in to observe the damage.
There wasn’t any. Even the olive oil, used to brown the sausage, didn’t leave a mark.
“It’s been christened by soy meat. It’s definitely a Mac,” a fellow Windows user pointed out, giggling.
A downside of owning an intriguing and expensive but lightweight machine is that clumsy people are, sadly, a serious menace. I’m not particularly clumsy myself (despite the sausage incident), but I quickly found myself hiding the MacBook if someone clumsy might suddenly get the idea to order some takeaway, check the stocks, or verify Apple’s claim that the machine has a nine-hour battery (it does). The computer fits inside a file folder, bringing us to our next non-obvious problem: it’s really not fun to search for it after it’s been shoved out of sight in a hurry.
There is another, more subtle bad point as well. The upside and downside of the retina display is that everything looks great on it, and more expensive. Even an ugly website calls out to you “Look at me! I am gorgeously smooth, simple, velvety and expensive! Interact, mortal!” Also, video services like Netflix look fantastic on it, and I have to be careful composing text because everything I write looks nicer and more important than it should.
Video streaming performance deserves a mention. Every laptop I’ve ever used before this one would eventually get hot and make fan noises when streaming movies for about 30 minutes or longer. The MacBook can deal with Netflix and YouTube for hours without this problem. Only 3D games requiring a graphics card (which it does not have) stress it, causing it to engage a relatively quiet* fan. (*quiet, considering it’s a laptop.)
The Lenovo I had before was designed and advertised as a ‘gaming’ laptop, which just means it has a graphics card and more powerful hardware than is probably necessary for everyday tasks. When actually playing games, it was quite loud and became hot very quickly. This is generally not good for the lifetime of a machine. I also had to plug in a mouse, even for a game that barely used one, because the Lenovo touchpad was prone to wrong signals.
My Lenovo taught me one of the most important elements of a good laptop is a good touchpad. I often bring a mouse with me on the move, but even more often, there isn’t space to use it, leaving me with the touchpad. I found on my Lenovo, click-and-drag operations were practically impossible, and the multiple-finger gestures it touted just didn’t work. These touchpad problems often resulted in unwanted actions, including the very worst: accidental deletions. In contrast, the MacBook touchpad always does exactly what I expect. It handles click-and-drag perfectly, and it understands multiple-finger gestures. My favourite is placing two fingers on the touchpad and sliding them up or down together, to scroll the screen without clicking anything. When the computer knows what you want, it certainly saves a lot of time and frustration.
If you grew up in the US in the 1980s, you probably used a lot of Apple computers, because Apple had an initiative to fill the schools with them. If you, like me, hadn’t really seen an Apple since the 1990s, you might wonder how this machine compares. The Apple computers I used in the nineties were quite similar to use. The menu bar has barely changed (although there are wifi and battery icons now!) and features are mostly found in either the same places, or more obvious places. When I first turned on the MacBook, I immediately wanted to change something, and was a little surprised to find the control panel was right where I expected. The option I needed was, too. The system font is also similar to the old one, making the experience feel much the same. Only a few typical interactions have noticeably changed, including the process to install a program (weird but easy), the disappearance of the open-apple and closed-apple keys (my first question: “Where is open-apple+S?”), and the way the system likes to keep programs open (easy to manage, once you’re on to the little dots in the program bar).
This entire experience has reminded me that laptop comparison charts display a lot of numbers, but the numbers do not tell the whole story about what we’re buying. When I swapped for the MacBook, I mainly did it because I was forced to, but also because I wanted a smaller, lighter computer with a long battery life and a better warranty. Comparison charts can tell us all that, but what they could not tell me, nor the person who picked out my Lenovo, was that this MacBook was designed and made with much greater care, from the best materials, and, importantly, its touchpad works like a dream. Charts also cannot tell us which computer is better engineered to run silently and cool, nor how long it might maintain that while bingeing Netflix. There is also not a rating system, to my knowledge, for how well it will withstand the daily-life onslaught of fingerprints and sausages, vegetarian or otherwise.
I still want to remove my MacBook’s logo, but overall I’m totally, unexpectedly delighted with the engineering. 
Notes - Computer Models
Lenovo
The Lenovo I had in the Autumn (Y50-70) is no longer sold new - there is only an ‘upgraded’, more expensive version now (just a bigger hard drive). This is the closest current model:
Lenovo Y50 Laptop, Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 15.6″ 4K Ultra HD, Black
MacBook Pro Retina
Apple MacBook Pro with Retina Display, Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB Flash Storage, 13.3″