Why now is not the time to jump ship on Apple’s Airport and Time Capsule

▼ On the latest episode of hist podcast, John Gruber complains that Apple’s Airport Extreme and Time Capsule Wi-Fi base stations are woefully out of date and Apple needs to release improved/faster models. Which is not going to happen. However, now is not the time to jump ship and replace your Apple base stations with new and shiny ones from a different vendor.

The argument I’m making here is that you shouldn’t replace your Apple base stations based on the notion that Apple has abandoned them and they won’t release something better in the future. Of course, if you’re unhappy with your Airport Extreme or Time Capsule today and think a different product will serve you better, that’s a different story.

The thing is, Apple’s base stations that were last updated in 2013 still do everything Apple wants them to do today, four years later. They have no reason to update them. The 2013 Airport Extreme and Time Capsule handle the highest Wi-Fi speeds that the latest Macs support: 1300 Mbps 802.11ac. So if you’re not getting the highest possible speeds over the internet, it’s not because your Airport Extreme or Time Capsule lacks raw bandwidth.

Sure, the drive in a Time Capsule tops out at a meager 40 MB/sec and the best third party base stations provide significantly better signal coverage, but those complaints aren’t new and there’s no reason to think that Apple is suddenly going to care about these issues.

It’s entirely possible that Apple disbanded the team that worked on these products because that team simply had nothing to do right now. We have no way of knowing whether this means that Apple is never going to release new Airport Extremes and/or Time Capsules. The current AE/TC were updated to support the then new IEEE 802.11ac standard in 2013. The successor to 802.11ac will be 802.11ax, which should be four times as fast and drive real world bandwidth well into the gigabit range. However, ax won’t be standardized until at least 2018 and probably 2019. So if we’re going to see new Airport Extremes and Time Capsules, it will probably be in 2019.

If you don’t want to wait that long, or believe that Apple isn’t going to release new Wi-Fi base stations, there’s still two good reasons to wait a year or so before switching. Those reasons are 2.5 and 5 Gbps Ethernet and Apple’s new file system, APFS.

Even after a decade, 10 Gbps Ethernet has had a hard time getting traction on the desktop. So those of us who still use wired Ethernet are still stuck on Gigabit Ethernet, which has been available since the early 2000s. The new 2.5 and 5 Gbps Ethernet standards are supposed to fix that, and we’ll probably see reasonably priced 2.5 / 5 Gbps products appear in the next year or so. So unless you have a good reason to upgrade now, it’s probably a good idea to wait for this to shake out.

Last but not least, there’s APFS. If you’re looking for just Wi-Fi networking, Apple’s new file system isn’t very relevant. But one of the big reasons to get a Time Capsule is that the TC allows for simple and easy wireless backups using Time Machine. In the early days, you really needed a Time Capsule to get networked Time Machine backups, but these days most NAS (network attached storage) devices that support Apple’s old AFS protocol for mounting network drives will let you make Time Machine backups.

However, it’s very likely that all of this is going to change in some way when APFS becomes available. Time Machine is built entirely around backing up whole files, while APFS’s snapshot features lend themselves much better to block level backups. It would be a shame to buy a new NAS that allows Time Machine backups today but won’t be compatible with a new version of Time Machine.

So there you have it. If Apple’s Airport Extreme or Time Capsule base stations serve your needs to a reasonable degree today, it makes sense to keep using them for another year or two and see what kind of new base stations and NASes become available and how they work with the Apple ecosystem as it exists at that point.

Permalink - posted 2017-01-14

USB-C dongles, adapters and cables (2)

▼ I'll probably have more to say about some of these later, but here's my list of USB-C adapters, cables and other devices I've collected the past few weeks:

• A 30 W USB-C / 12 W USB-A charger
• A 90 cm USB-C to USB-C cable
• A USB-C to DisplayPort cable
• A USB-C to DisplayPort adapter
• A Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter (from Apple)
• A USB-C to VGA adapter
• A USB-C to HDMI adapter
• A USB-C and USB-A SD card reader
• A USB-C and USB-A 64 GB flash drive
• A USB-C to USB-A adapter
• A slightly longer USB-C to USB-A adapter
• A USB-C to USB A male cable (ordered by mistake, but may turn out useful after all)
• A USB-C to micro-USB cable

Way back in 2008 I got a second charger for my laptop. This means that I can connect my laptop to power both on the couch and at my desk without messing with chargers. Because battery life is so good these days and MagSafe is gone on the new laptops, I plan on using the new MacBook Pro on battery power more often, but I still want that second charger. And that's the nice thing about the move to USB-C: you can now charge using any charger that conforms to the USB Power Delivery (USB-PD) standard. I decided to get a cheap 30 W one, I can always get a bigger one if this one doesn't work or charges too slowly.

The downside is that you now need to buy a USB-C to USB-C cable to connect to the charger separately. I tried to find a fully wired one, so I got this 90 cm one from Aukey which has an e-marked chip. Turns out that 90 cm is pretty short, so I'll probably get a longer one at some later point, and maybe a charge / USB 2 one only.

Obviously I need to connect to external displays, so I got the DisplayPort cable and adapter as well as HDMI. I was thinking about skipping VGA, but the third party one isn't expensive and I'm sure it'll come in handy a few times.

Apple's Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter is pretty expensive, but that way I get target disk mode between my old and new computer as well as 10 Gbps (maybe even 20?) networking between those two, so it's the only reasonable way to transfer files quickly. And I can reuse my Thunderbolt Gigabit Ethernet adapter.

Then there's a USB C/A SD card reader, a USB C/A flash drive (which is super fast by the way, at 150/80 MB/sec read/write), a couple of type C to type A adapters. I also got a five pack of USB-C to USB-A male cables by accident. You have to be really careful with the words "USB 3.0" as this is often used for "USB type A connector".

And last but not least, a type C to micro-USB. This will let me charge my bluetooth headphones, and with the micro-USB to lightning adapter that I already have, I can use it to charge and sync my iPhone and iPad.

But, let's not forget that my previous computers also required various dongles and cables:

• USB superdrive
• Thunderbolt 1/2 cable
• Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter
• miniDisplayPort to DisplayPort cable (third party)
• miniDisplayPort to HDMI adapter (third party) (some of these have been unreliable for me)
• miniDisplayPort to VGA adapter
• miniDisplayPort to DVI adapter (haven't used this one in a few years!)

To add insult to injury, when the new MacBooks with miniDisplayPort came out, it took a month for the dongles to become available so that first month I had to work without an external monitor, like an animal.

At least now the first party dongles are available right away and there are many third party options.

Permalink - posted 2016-11-12

Some thoughts on USB-C cables

▼ I did it: I ordered a new MacBook Pro.

So now I need a bunch of USB-C dongles and cables. Turns out that there's quite a bit to consider when shopping for USB-C cables. Here are some notes on what I learned. Please note that I couldn't confirm all of it, double check yourself as needed.

Power

In principle, everything that applies to powering/charging USB devices over a USB type A port also applies to a USB type C port. So charging devices that take up to 12 Watts should be the same as before.

However, USB-C also has a Power Delivery specification. With USB-C PD, a charger can deliver 5, 9, 12, 15 or 20 Volts at 3 Ampères with regular cables and even 5 A with special cables, for a total of 60 or 100 W. All of this will be negotiated by the devices at both ends of the USB-C cable, and even the cable itself has a say because it's supposed to have a chip that identifies its capabilities.

However, be careful when you're using an adapter or cable to connect a USB-C device to a non-USB-C charger or computer. There have been reports of damage from this because the USB-C device drew more power than the other side could provide. So if you want to mix and match USB types, research your cables before buying.

Data speeds

The USB-C port has separate pins for USB 2 (480 Mbps and slower) and USB 3 and alternate modes such as DisplayPort, HDMI and Thunderbolt. So it's possible to have USB-C cables that only support USB 2 speeds as well as full featured cables that connect all the pins. As this requires 10 extra wires, this makes the cables thicker and stiffer, and very likely more expensive.

USB 3 originally supported 5 Gbps, but this was later upgraded to 10 Gbps. Thunderbolt 3 runs over the USB-C port at 40 Gbps for 0.5 m and shorter cables, 20 Gbps for longer cables. I tried to find out whether the higher speeds require different cables, but I couldn't find any information on this. So I'm going to assume that a quality 0.5 m cable will handle 10 Gbps USB and 40 Gbps Thunderbolt, and a longer cable 10 Gbps USB and 20 Gbps Thunderbolt. (Only expensive active cables support Thunderbolt over longer distances than 0.5 m.) So you probably don't have to pay extra for a cable that specifically says it supports 10 Gbps USB 3.1 or 40/20 Gbps Thunderbolt 3.

What to get

If you're buying a cable to connect to a charger, it's probably easier/cheaper to get a charger cable, especially if it's a longer one, such as 2m. I believe those still support USB 2 data speeds, but you'll want to check to make sure. If you want to charge a 15" MacBook Pro at maximum speed or run really demanding stuff on it, you'll want to use a 85 - 100 W charger and a 5 A cable.

15" MacBook Pros have always come with 85 W chargers but in my experience they run just fine on a 60 W charger. With a 60 W USB-C charger you should be able to use any USB-C cable, so that's much more convenient for a second charger.

I'm very interested to see how the new MacBook Pros handle smaller chargers. I ordered one that can deliver 30 W, which should be enough to run the 15" MBP off of most of the time, but it probably won't charge very fast. Or maybe the computer won't charge or even run off of such a small charger at all.

For data cables, I wouldn't pay extra for 10 Gbps or Thunderbolt-compatible ones. Very likely, cables that don't advertise these capabilities still support them. And you probably don't need those speeds right away anyway, so it's probably best to wait until cable compatibility gets clearer and prices are likely to come down in the interim anyway.

Permalink - posted 2016-10-30

The Touch Bar: why it makes sense

▼ The introduction of the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pros has kicked off a lot of discussion. How is this better than the function keys, those are touch typable, unlike the Touch Bar which pretty much requires looking before touching. And how is the Touch Bar better than a touch screen, where you interact with the stuff on the screen directly?

That's missing the point. The Touch Bar isn't a replacement for function keys—in functionality, that is. Nor is it a replacement for a touch screen. It's something completely new!

Until now, we had the following classes of input devices:

• Keyboard
• Pointing device (mouse, trackpad, trackball)
• Touch screen
• Dictation

And now we have the Touch Bar.

Each of these has their strengths and weaknesses. In theory, you can enter text with a mouse by clicking on a virtual keyboard or move around objects on the screen with voice commands, but that's clearly not workable. It doesn't look like the Touch Bar can perform functions that the other input methods can't reasonably handle. So it must earn its place in our computing lives by being able to do something better or more efficiently than the existing input methods.

There doesn't seem to be much direct competition between the Touch Bar and dictation, so let's skip that comparison.

A touch screen or a pointing device can be used to select objects on the screen and click/tap or drag them. The Touch Bar can't do that. A touch screen or pointing device can also be used to activate buttons. That's something the Touch Bar can also do. The mouse has an advantage here because it can handle very many very small buttons on the screen. Touch screens need larger buttons so there can't be too many of them or there won't be room for content on the screen.

Using a mouse or trackpad isn't particularly fast, especially for users who aren't proficient with them, because it requires a feedback loop between moving your and seeing the pointer move. There's also the overhead of having to move your hand from the keyboard to the trackpad or the mouse. On a small device like an iPhone, tapping the screen is quick and easy. On a larger touch screen things get harder as you need to use both hands and move your hand around to reach different parts of the screen. On a computer this becomes unworkable quickly as you have to lift and stretch your arm to reach the screen. Hence Apple's refusal to include touch screens on their computers.

So in situations where there's only a handful to a dozen of relevant buttons, the Touch Bar has a clear advantage: you can hit those buttons by just stretching your fingers. Another advantage is that these buttons don't have to be on the screen so they don't obscure the content, which can be important for working with photos and videos and the like in full screen.

But what about the keyboard? Wouldn't it be more efficient to bind these functions to a key?

As with most things in life, it depends.

There are different ways to use the keyboard. Ideally, you don't have to look at the keys at all to type (touch typing). This requires that you know where all the keys are along with muscle memory to be able to hit them in the blind. I'd say that you can't really do this on a virtual keyboard such as on the iPad, but apparently there are people that are pretty good at this even though there's no tactile feedback to let you know that you're starting to drift away from hitting the keys dead on.

Very few people can hit all the keys on the keyboard without having to look, and most people can't even hit the letter keys without having to look as they only use a few fingers and thus need to move their hands more. However, experienced typers who are not (full) touch typists still know where the keys are. It's just that they have to look at their fingers to be sure they're going to hit them. Let's call this typing strategy look-before-you-leap typing. (So remappable keys with e-ink keycaps are never going to work for the main keys.)

Last but not least there's hunt-and-peck typing. With this strategy, the typist doesn't have the keys memorized, so he or she needs to scan the keyboard to find the desired key and then type it. With close to a hundred keys, this is very, very slow.

Obviously, the fastest way to activate a function is touch type a key that has that function bound to it. I'm pretty sure that's why Apple's Touch Bar human interface guidelines say often used functions such as copy and paste shouldn't be put on the Touch Bar, but used with keyboard shortcuts instead.

The trouble is that it's very hard to remember lesser used keyboard shortcuts. This is where the Touch Bar comes in: it presents a limited set of context relevant options within easy reach. So if you want to print you're still going to type ⌘P, but if you want to want to change text formatting while typing in Pages, that's probably easier and faster to do by looking down at the Touch Bar and tap the relevant virtual button there than it would be to use the mouse/trackpad. Then at some point you can move from the hunt-and-peck strategy to the look-before-you-leap typing strategy and get even faster using the Touch Bar. Unlike memorizing keyboard shortcuts, this will happen automatically simply through repetition. Interestingly, Pages is one of the relatively few modern applications that still uses the function keys. You can bind up to eight text styles to a function key, and then change a paragraph to that style by hitting that function key. My old Model M keyboard has three groups of four function keys well above the number row, and with the Model M changing styles as I'm typing this is actually very quick and easy. I did have to manually go in and bind a function key to the styles I'm using, though.

On my MacBook Pro's internal keyboard, this doesn't work nearly as well, for two reasons. First, by default, the function keys are bound to system functions. If you want to use these keys as function keys, you have to type them together with the fn key in the lower left corner of the keyboard. Or you can change a setting to make this such that they're function keys by default and the system functions are activated in combination with fn. But even with this setting, hitting the function keys isn't very convenient because they're only half height and it's hard to keep the ones in the middle apart by touch. (Many touch typists can't even touch type the keys on the number row very well or at all.)

What I found by taking the function keys for a spin for the first time in a while is that hitting one in the middle of regular typing isn't very convenient, because they're out of the way. But if you have to type a bunch of function keys in a row, the Model M layout with groups of four function keys works very well. However, you either need to know them dead or you have to be able to correct hitting the wrong one by simply hitting the right one. I can certainly imagine some people with specific needs using external function key pads the same way we have external number pads these days. But I doubt many people are going to miss the current vestigial function keys from their MacBook Pros.

In conclusion, the Touch Bar occupies new territory between (function) keys and a touch screen, without duplicating either's function directly. It remains to be seen how useful it'll turn out in practice, but there's absolutely a lot of potential in having a way to activate some commonly used functions quickly without taking your hands off the keyboard.

Permalink - posted 2016-10-29

Thinking about the new MacBook Pro

▼ Unless something extremely unexpected happens, on the 27th, Apple will be announcing new MacBook Pros. These are long overdue, the last update was a year and a half ago. The rumors and leaks point towards the following:

• Slightly smaller and lighter
• All the existing ports are gone except for the 3.5 mm audio jack
• The machine gains four USB-C ports, which are used for:
  • Charging
  • USB
  • Thunderbolt 3
  • External screens using USB-C to DisplayPort or HDMI cables or adapters
  • External screens using a VGA adapter
• The esc, power and function keys are replaced with a touch screen at the top of the keyboard
• There's a TouchID fingerprint reader

There's a lot of gnashing of teeth about much of this. But not all of it is is necessarily well-founded. Let's have a look at the possible issues that such a machine may have.

Power / MagSafe

I think it was with the Intel-based MacBook (Pros) that Apple introduced the MagSafe connector for power. The MagSafe connector attaches to the laptop magnetically, so if you trip over the power cord, it simply detaches and nothing bad happens. I once tripped over my PowerBook's power cable and sent it flying through the room. MagSafe is definitely very useful.

On the other hand, there are some advantages to charging over USB-C, too. USB-C can deliver as much as 100 Watts over a very small connector. But a USB-C charger is still compatible with older USB power delivery specifications, so you should be able to charge other devices that take power over USB with it, too. Including bluetooth headphones, mice and iPhones. And with USB-C it's possible to handle data, video and power over a single cable. So in the future I could hook up my computer to an external screen with just one cable rather than two or three.

And USB-C is an open standard, so it'll get much easier/cheaper to find power supplies.

It would have been nice to keep MagSafe, but with laptops getting smaller it's getting harder to make MagSafe work well. Also, with 10 hours of battery life, you can simply connect to power when the computer is on a desk or another place where it's unlikely the power cable will be snagged and then use it on battery power elsewhere.

I do wonder about the power key/button, though. You do need a hardware key to power on the machine, and power it off when it hangs. But there doesn't seem to be one in the leaked photos...?

The SD card slot

I'm really going to miss this one. Now I have to carry an extra cable to connect to my cameras. Of course they both have different ones and they plug into a USB type A port, so I also need an adapter. Using the cable drains the camera's battery and is slower than reading photos off of the SD card directly. Or get a card reader. Again, with a USB-A to USB-C adapter or wait / pay extra of a fast USB-C one.

Also, you can use the SD card slot to add some semi-internal storage to your computer.

Losing all of this really sucks.

External screens

Currently, adapters to DisplayPort, HDMI and VGA go for about $/€ 45. That's pretty expensive. Hopefully the price will come down in the not too distant future.

Removing the HDMI port together with the miniDisplayPort / Thunderbolt ports is really annoying, because now you have to carry some kind of adapter to connect to an external screen or projector just as HDMI was becoming the lingua franca of external video.

Again, this sucks, certainly for business / conference stuff. But once the adapters/cables come down in price, connecting an external screen on a disk using a USB-C port shouldn't be a big deal.

USB

We've all had 20 years to collect numerous USB devices that use the USB type A connector. So moving to USB type C requires adapters. It would have been much easier if Apple just wouldn't be so Apple-y and just give us some old ports along with the new ones.

But it's not a huge deal. With one adapter you can hook up an individual USB device or a USB hub and attach old USB stuff. And within a year or two nearly everything will be USB-C.

Thunderbolt and networking

I assume the new MacBook Pros will be using the latest USB 3.1 gen 2 so they can reach 10 Gbps over USB. Thunderbolt still beats that handily at no less than 40 Gbps for Thunderbolt 3. Conveniently, Thunderbolt 3 also uses the USB-C port. If you have a fully wired USB-C cable (which doesn't include the one that comes with the current USB-C MacBook, this one tops out at the 480 Mbps USB 2 rate), you should be able to run Thunderbolt over it as well as USB.

However, Thunderbolt 1 and 2 use the miniDisplayPort plug/connector. So in order to keep using your existing Thunderbolt stuff, you'll need an adapter or cable. Hopefully Apple will sell these, but I expect them to be expensive.

I think I'll get one, because this is the only way to connect my old MBP to a new one at speeds that can keep up with the SSD in my current machine.

It would be nice to be able to keep using my Thunderbolt Gigabit Ethernet adapter, but what I really want is 5 / 2.5 Gbps Ethernet. Hopefully that will be coming soon at a reasonable price. So I'm probably not going to get a new USB-C to GE adapter. Then again, if I want to be able to use 2.5 or 5 Gbps Ethernet, I need at least two of these adapters... Networking over Thunderbolt is probably faster and easier, although in the past the speeds were inconsistent.

I haven't heard about Wi-Fi improvements beyond the 1.3 Gbps that my late 2013 MacBook Pro supports. And even if the Wi-Fi gets faster, it's unlikely to surpass wired Gigabit Ethernet.

The function keys

The new touchscreen strip is really interesting. Although Steve Jobs made a big thing about the software keyboard on the iPhone, Apple has always refused to add touch capability to their laptop screens. This seems to be a way to square the circle: give you (some) touch screen ability on your laptop without the "gorilla arm" phenomenon that occurs when you have to lift your arms to touch the screen.

Of course it all depends on how the new abilities are used, but it seems obvious that Apple and third party developers could do something useful with this strip, by displaying context aware options.

The trouble, of course, is that now the function keys are gone. I don't think very many people use the actual function keys (F1 - F10) regularly, and certainly not without looking at the keys. I can kinda-sorta touch type numbers through the number row, but I can't use most of the function keys without looking. However, I can use the volume keys on the right side without looking.

I'm thinking that if you press the fn key in the lower left corner of the keyboard, the strip will show F1 - F10 / F12. And you can probably still set up the system so it uses the function keys if you don't press the fn key. If they align those keys with the number keys on the keyboard, you can use those to position your finger and then tap the touch screen strip. So it should still be possible to use the function keys without looking.

(Some people have suggested having a keyboard with e-ink mini-displays on all keys. Nice idea, but it's not going to work. Real typists don't look at the keys and thus the keys can't change and thus they don't need a display.)

I wonder where the power button went. But obviously it must still be there in some form.

The biggest issue I have with the new touch screen strip is that we lose the escape key. Hopefully, you can still hit the location of the escape key to trigger the escape function, so this shouldn't be too terrible, but I'm sure I'm going to miss the actual key. (Yes, I'll admit it, I'm a vi user.)

Verdict: color me intrigued. The touch screen strip could be great or it could be a dud. I'll survive the removal of the function keys and probably even the escape key.

Conclusion

I haven't talked about the TouchID fingerprint reader because it doesn't take away any current functionality. It's probably going to be very useful, but if you don't want to use it, don't and you lose nothing.

As so often with Apple, the future arrives before we're really ready for it. I'm sure that in 2019, this is going to be a great laptop. But it just doesn't fit into the 2016 or 2017 computing ecosystem all that well.

I'm probably going to get one, but I'm also going to hang on to my old computer so I don't have to buy a crapload of adapters and cables in order to use my existing peripherals.

Permalink - posted 2016-10-26