Monthly Archives: June 2013

Leica X Vario

Cameras

A comedic touch.

Proving once again that it’s impossible to underestimate the intelligence of the (camera) consumer, Leica gives us this doorstop:

For your $2,850 you get a modest range 28-70mm (FFE) fixed zoom with the splendid maximum aperture of f/6.4 for your APS-C sensor at the long end. f/6.4!

And no viewfinder!

Add one for $200 (Olympus VF-2) or $500 (Leica rebranded Olympus VF-2) and you have a mediocre EVF which still works poorly in bright sun.

For that sort of money you can get a premium Canon or Nikon APS-C body with a stellar zoom lens with a real aperture, and money left over. A semi-pro quality Nikon D7100 will run you $1,200. Add a no less stellar 24-120mm fixed f/4 zoom for a further $1,300 and you still have $350 left compared to this toy from Leica.

Or, with MFT sensors now competitive with APS-C, an Olympus OMD will cost you $925 and $250 for a 28-84mm compact zoom.

Amazing what people will pay for a red dot.

MacBook Air 2013 – Part I

Macintosh

Kaizen at work.

‘Kaizen’ refers to the Japanese concept of making a good machine then continually improving it. You can see it in Japanese cars where certain brands like Lexus command extraordinarily high repeat purchase rates. When you have owned one you keep coming back for more because you know that what was already very good is now even better.


The 2013 MacBook Air – appearance unchanged from 2012.

And so it is with Apple’s MacBook Air, the third version of which I will be receiving next week, the 2013. I reviewed the 2012 here.

That was barely 12 months ago so why upgrade? First, as a job related expense, the upgrade cost to me is pretty much zero. Used MBAs hold value well and I’ll net $700 on the old one. Second, the improvements in the 2013 model – I’ll be getting the 11″ version yet again – are far from trivial, including:

  • Battery life up from 5 to 9 hrs (meaning from 4 to 8 hrs in real world use)
  • Cooler running and lower power consumption Haswell i5 CPU
  • Greatly improved graphics from the new HD5000 Intel integrated GPU
  • Faster SSD now connected using PCIe rather than SATA – an industry first
  • $1,000 for the 128GB SSD version compared with $1,100 a year ago
  • The first computer with 802-11ac wifi

The big one is battery life and while Apple claims the credit for that it results from the use of Intel’s exciting new Haswell CPU which dramatically cuts power consumption. While the new CPU appears slower at 1.3GHz compared with 1.7GHz for the 2012 model, in practice the Turbo mode – automatically invoked when needed – doubles the speed to 2.6GHz and early Geekbench tests suggest the speed is identical to its predecessor.

As usual I’ll test the machine using Lightroom and Photoshop and will report back in Part II. I expect only improvement over the already very capable 2012 version which runs both apps fine if not super fast.

Meanwhile, a word on the new 802-11ac wifi, an industry first. You will need to buy a new router and Apple obliges with the latest Airport Extreme at the same $200 asked for the old version. Both computer and router are backwards compatible with 802-11a, b, g and n so a new router is only required if 802-11ac works in your environment. The new technology claims to seek out your computer’s location, speeding throughput.

Apple’s new router looks every bit as inept as the new MacPro as regards form factor, and I’ll wait for the likes of AnandTech to test real world speed before deciding whether to upgrade my now ancient single-band Airport Extreme.


2013 Airport Extreme, waiting to tip over.

The tippy looking shape suggests either Velcro is called for or that the device is placed horizontally. Whether the latter orientation affects antenna function remains to be seen.

Apple did not announce a Retina Display version of the MBA and nor do I expect them to. That would simply cannibalize the MacBook Pro RD and there would be little to choose on pricing. Further, current battery technology would not deliver useful life with the MBA’s thin chassis when used with the power hungry Retina Display.

Apple has shown time and again that it can do truly dumb things – the Lisa, the Cube, the Newton and now the new MacPro – but they are skillfully applying kaizen to their fine MBA product.

Part II, with performance measurements, is here.

Mac Pro 2013

Hackintosh, Mac Pro

Much less than meets the eye.

Announced with much hype at this week’s Apple WWDC, the new MacPro is an exercise in trying to be different for difference’s sake, a solution looking for a problem. I stopped watching the hypefest after the third use of the now meaningless “awesome” and got on with better things.


2013 Mac wastepaper basket, errr …. Mac Pro.

Had they really thought about it, maybe the monolith from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ would have been a better form factor than a garbage can, but whatever. 1:4:9 form factors are nothing to make a joke of.

The driving thought behind this design – other than trying to look innovative – is the same as behind almost every Apple product. Take away user choice and lock up the box. The last Apple machine to offer user expandability in any meaningful way is the current MacPro. As Apple disregarded that machine as it morphed into a cell phone maker, the 2012 (more like 2007) MacPro is seriously overpriced and seriously dated, easily outperformed by any number of MacBook Pro laptops. Laptops! This has left a lot of graphics pros unhappy, with many migrating to high end HP and Dell workstations, trading the horrors of Windows for the speed of current silicon.

Now nothing Apple does to the MacPro will move the needle on its sales and profits, both a rounding error to the world’s largest technology company. But it’s a flagship product with high exposure to ‘tastemakers’ (ugh!) in Hollywood and much smarter people in Lawrence Livermore Labs, so as a vanity product it makes sense to retain it in the line. Apple has taken the approach of locking up the box, making it very small and doubtless thermally challenged (sound familiar?) and delegated all the storage goodness to external devices. With Intel’s Thunderbolt2 providing high speed connectivity, all your drives will be in very costly external enclosures, connected with TB cables. The Intel Xeon CPU and the twin AMD GPUs in the MacPro’s cylinder will do their thing on externally stored files. Sure you can use USB2 drives, but then much of what is good in the can is lost. However, there is an HDMI socket and the GPU supports 4K video, so this will make a great HTPC for the well heeled!

All of your old drives, heretofore cheaply connected internally running at 3GB/s (6GB/s never having made it to the MacPro) will have to be removed and placed in costly TB boxes or simply junked after the data are migrated. And as for the strange – comical almost – cylindrical shape, blackened in anticipation of huge thermal challenges, who on earth cares when the machine will immediately be stashed under the desk? Sure, the old MacPro is gorgeous to look at, but that’s a phase called ‘unpacking’. After that, it disappears, though unlike the 2013 model (“Awesome! 12% of the volume of the old one. Innovation!”) it will not fall over as soon as you accidentally kick it. Nor will it overheat when taxed. But, heck, with the 2013 MacPro feel free to enjoy the jumble of external boxes and cables which it will demand, and save on home heating bills, too. And as for PCIe expansion cards for all those high end audio and graphics users, fughedaboutit. And your apps use nVidia’s ‘awesome’ CUDA graphics acceleration technology? Ha! You’re out of luck because the ATI graphics in the new MacPro will not support that.

The costly 12core Xeon CPU and two AMD GPU specs, doubtless complemented by overpriced and soldered in SSD storage for the OS and apps, make it hard to think that this machine will sell for under $5,000. Call it $8k with external storage, optical drives, card readers, etc. Not that the desperately in want audience will care as, for the most part, they are spending the boss’s money, not their own.

Well, you can rejoice in the knowledge that the gadget will be assembled in the USA by four displaced Detroit auto workers who should adequately fill the demand.


The MacPro. Looking better already.

You will never be able to add the highest speed RAM to that old box, but you can plug in PCIe USB3 and Thunderbolt cards if needed, which makes it almost current while still running cool. As for DVD and Blu-Ray burners, no problemo.

It’s too bad more high end users will not make the time to learn the simple process of creating a Hackintosh. For 20% of the cost of a 2013 MacPro you get an ugly box, state of the art components and exceptional cooling, and no one will laugh at you when you show them just how ugly your box is. It’s the same box you assembled 5 years ago and have updated annually for $200 to maintain performance leadership. A Hummer isn’t pretty either, but its looks are consonant with its goals – brute strength and reliability. Much like a good Hackintosh. The 2013 MacPro is no Hummer. More like one of those low end plastic Mercedes beloved of the polyester set.


Hackintosh – the Hummer of computers.
Everything worth knowing in one picture.

Lightroom 5

Lightroom

Worth the money.

All the enhancements I set forth here are in the final release, made yesterday. The upgrade from earlier versions is $79 and easily worth the money, not least for the splendid keystone correction which is built-in.

Conversion of my catalog, some 10,000 mostly RAW files totaling 265GB with another 35GB of full size previews, took around 5 minutes and performance seems identical in all respects to Lightroom 4, meaning excellent. The application opens in 5-7 seconds on my nuclear powered Hackintosh (Sandy Bridge i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, nVidia GTX660 GPU), and image-to-image changes are instantaneous. Life-size previews really help here and I recommend you create those when importing files. The penalty in terms of storage space is modest, with 13% additional space used in my case.


Rain in Burlingame, CA. A rare sight.

Photo taken on the iPhone 5, processed in Lightroom 5.