 The MacBook early 2015 is here. Is it as amazing as Apple's inability to keep it in stock anywhere and the appearance of sealed units on eBay far greater than retail price would indicate? Or is it a colossal failure and only worthy of being burned with fire, or given my usual water treatment? Well one or both of those things is definitely coming, so get subscribed now if you aren't already. Kingston KC 310 series business grade SSDs feature firmware based power loss protection, massive capacities, and performance to spare. In fact we're using them for our new production server. Click right here to learn more about them. This video promised to be one of the easiest that I'd ever written and yet it ended up being one of the most difficult. I thought it would be easy because I summed up with the help of our buddy John Retinger from TechnoBuffalo my thoughts on the thing over two months ago and figured I could pretty much point vaguely to my left and say basically that. But it was difficult because now that I've actually been hands on and using it as a daily driver I'm finding the 12 inch Retina MacBook early 2015 edition whatever it's called, man I hate their naming scheme, a little bit more difficult to hate. A little. On the top of the unit under our protective D brand vinyl wrap is a plain blasted anodized aluminum finish with an Apple logo square in the middle. On the bottom is more plain aluminum and I guess this would be a good time to point out that it can be silver gold or space gray with some assembly screws and four black feet that are surprisingly non-grippy making it easy to slide around on the desk. Then on the sides we find one of the main sources of the controversy that exists around this product. A 3.5 millimeter combo audio jack on the right and a single tiny USB type C connector on the left. That's it. So out of the box you are expected to use the built-in wireless AC 867 megabit Bluetooth or that USB port. So it better be one special USB port then right? Well actually it kind of is. So for starters and this is important it is not a USB 3.1 10 gigabit port rather it runs at the older USB 3.0 5 gigabit speed but because it uses the type C connector it gets some extra fancy functionality. Number one is power. It can both deliver more power than a standard USB 3.0 type A port and it can receive power to charge your notebook which is good because it's sure not getting power from anywhere else. Number two is alternate modes which use auxiliary pins in the type C connector to enable extra functionality like HDMI or DisplayPort video output with more fancy adapters soon to come. But Linus you might say, I wouldn't have needed any of that adapter stuff if I just had a Megsafe power connector and a couple of normal ports on it. Lenovo and Asus managed devices this thin without removing all the ports why couldn't Apple do that? Great question. Moving on. The MacBook has a silky smooth albeit a little bit flimsy feeling one finger hinge that opens to reveal some of the actually more interesting things that Apple has done under the hood. I'll start with the webcam. It's a piece of crap and I'd say Apple's design team should be embarrassed but this is the same company that put a microphone on the back of an all-in-one PC so I guess anything goes around there. So let's move on to the display. Why is it that Apple is the only one willing to buck the industry 16 by 9 aspect ratio trend and put a 16 by 10 display on smaller devices where that extra vertical space is a freaking godsend? Thank you Apple for the bright beautiful 2304 by 1440 stunner of an IPS monitor that you've crammed into this device. Since I use a Razer Blade 14 as my daily driver I instantly started swiping around on it only to realize that Apple still thinks a fraction of a millimeter is more important than a touchscreen so the rules are similar to the local strip club but hey it's better than a pickle and ice cream sandwich and I'll take it. Under the screen are the surprisingly not horrible speakers. Most devices this thin are basically un-listened to-able and will actually cause vibrating distortion when turned up to the max but while I didn't experience any thunderous bass while watching the Avengers Age of Ultron trailer the experience was actually not too shabby which leads us finally to the meat and potatoes of any notebook video. What's it like to actually use the thing? Well the story starts before the device was even shipped when dbrand thoughtfully offered to preload Windows for me. I told them no don't worry about it it's okay to which they replied are you sure? You'll need the type-c breakout adapter from Apple which is out of stock and a USB hub just to plug in the two flash drives required for the bootcamp setup process. And that's really the experience in a nutshell. Want to do casual things like watching HD YouTube videos around the house? Willing to use another separate computer every time you want to plug in a mouse or transfer files off your camera? Great experience. Want to do any kind of power user stuff on the go? Although that stuff I just mentioned hardly feels power user to me. Buy something else because you'll either be carting around adapters that negate the ease of use benefits of a thin light or you'll be constantly frustrated. But while it's easy to hate on and the lack of ports all but eliminates this MacBook as an option for someone like me there were some things I really liked about the device. The haptic feedback touchpad and keyboard. Both very controversial design choices stood out to me actually as a step in the right direction. I'll start with the touchpad. Instead of a hinge at the top and a mechanical downward movement to make it click to save space that Apple assures us was used to cram in more batteries for that nine hours of web browsing per charge, the entire surface of the spacious glass-topped capacitive touchpad is pressure sensitive and vibrates when you press a little bit to simulate a click, then again with an adjustable pressure threshold in software when you press harder. It's awesome. This isn't your dad's haptic feedback that makes the whole device shake and sounds like it's going to fall apart. It's incredibly subtle and I'm willing to bet that if you didn't tell your mom that the touchpad doesn't actually press down, she would swear that it was moving down. And on top of that, it's really useful. Since there's no driver support in Windows for the feature, not to mention the annoying delays on double touch to drag I had to fire up OS X which thankfully I somewhat know how to use thanks to this video series where it does loads of cool stuff like allowing quick renaming of files and folders, file previews, getting shipment details when you force touch, a tracking number, previewing links in your browser and much more. Paradigm shifting. I wish it was more customizable, but who knows, maybe that's to come. Then again it is Apple. The keyboard though is one that many more people are raising hell about and I get it. Apple's butterfly switch, another space saving feature does not have the same satisfying tactile feedback of a mechanical switch or even a half decent scissor switch. But I have to give them credit here. I may not enjoy the typing experience and I don't. But if I evaluate it objectively, then all I can say is this. Unlike ASUS, they squeezed an ambient light sensitive backlight in there. Like Microsoft's original touch cover, it's extraordinarily slim and without practice I am similarly fast with a similar number of errors compared to my razor blade. That's f***ing impressive. Which I guess lands us at the conclusion for this video where I usually try to summarize what the product is and who it's for. So that will take a bit longer than usual because those answers are anything but simple here. What is it? On the surface it appears to be a MacBook Air usurper with no I.O. that Apple is cramming down our throats by refusing to modernize the Air with a decent screen and storage. But if we dig a little deeper and look at that tiny, basically iPad sized PCB that Apple is bragging about, we discover what it really is. A tablet whose touch screen was stolen and replaced with a keyboard cover while it wasn't looking. Making it a proof of concept product for two things. At least two things. Number one, the rumored upcoming Apple CPU. If a Core M can power a hyper mobile Yosemite experience, then I wouldn't be surprised to see an A10 or A11 chip do that in a couple of years. And number two, USB type C. Since it gives Apple a chance to ship this undoubtedly thoroughly validated, but not yet field tested connector in a relatively low volume product before they risk deploying tens of millions of phones and tablets in the upcoming refresh only to discover that it caused all kinds of problems. And as usual, the what is it goes a long way towards helping us answer who is it for. Not me, that's for sure. As much as I absolutely love the battery life and I can't help but feel just a little bit cooler when I whip it out and start typing away at the airport, I've got s*** to do. And you'd have a much easier time selling me an Air with a decent screen, thanks to its much more powerful hardware. Not to mention the unassailably technologically superior Thunderbolt and MagSafe power connector combo. Whose benefits range from additional speed and device daisy chaining to the fact that some asshole in Starbucks isn't going to trip on your cable, pulling your thousand dollar computer off the table right as you were about to save that latte powered novel you've been working on. In fact, the only downside is that Thunderbolt stuff like Docks is generally more expensive than USB stuff. But on top of the MacBook's inexplicably large price premium compared to similar devices like the Asus ZenBook UX305, Apple wants $80 for a fracking USB breakout dongle anyway, negating a lot of the cost savings. But I told myself this wasn't going to turn into a rant so I won't do that and I'll just do a snappy ending line like, So if Apple wants your devices to reflect who you are as a person, then I guess if you bought a MacBook 12 inch late 2015 Retina, you're the kind of person who's not in a hurry and even if you were, you don't have anything particularly important to do. But you need to do it for a long time in between charges and look really cool while you do it. Speaking of looking cool, Ting's mobile network supports the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus so you can look cool while talking on your phone without paying more than you have to. They're the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction, which means when you call them, you don't talk to a robot, you get through directly to a person. You also pay for only what you use with the average Ting bill at about 24 months, 24 months, $24 per month per device. If you're stuck in a contract, Ting will cover up to 25% of your cancellation fee up to $75 and if you head over to linus.ting.com and try out their savings calculator and sign up, you'll get $25 in service credit or towards a new device. So check that out now. So I think that's pretty much it guys. Thanks for watching. Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment preferably at the forum link in our video description there. Also linked in the video description is our merch page where you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, a contribution page where you can give us monthly contribution if you want us to keep making videos and a place where you can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you're buying MacBooks on Amazon or do they even sell MacBooks on Amazon? I don't know. If you do buy MacBook on Amazon, I really don't recommend this one. Wait for an upgraded air. Hopefully it's coming. Thanks again for watching and as always, don't forget to subscribe. Not to mention there are many excellent options for PC notebooks too, just saying.