Apple - WKTV Journal

View of the 2020 Robinette’s Maze. (Supplied/Robinette’s)

By Kerrie Van Eck
Robinette’s Apple Haus & Winery

Jim and Bethel Robinette played key roles in the success and growth of what is now known as Robinette’s Apple Haus & Winery. This year, Jim and Bethel passed away, a month apart. Robinette’s is dedicating the maze design this year to honor and recognize Jim and Bethel’s hard work and dedication to making Robinette’s what it is today – an agritainment destination for the community to enjoy.

Jim and Bethel turned the family’s wholesale fruit farm into a farm market open to the public in the early 1970s and things just grew from there.

Jim served in the Merchant Marines at the end of World War II and served again in the army in the Korean War. He was named the “Apple Man of the Year” by the Michigan Pomesters in March of 2013. Jim and Bethel were married in 1962. Bethel’s degree in teaching helped her become a great person to lead school tours at the farm. She participated in the Farm Women’s Symposium and served as President of the Michigan State Horticultural Society Women’s Auxiliary.

Jim and Bethel Robinette are created for turning the family wholesale fruit farm into a farmer’s market open to the public. (Supplied/Robinette’s)

Jim and Bethel’s hobbies and interests included faithful involvement in their church, gardening, baking, singing in the choir and family ties. They loved greeting all the wonderful visitors to the farm and were genuinely interested in them as individuals.

They were married 58 years and were the third generation to farm at Robinette’s. The fourth, fifth, and now sixth generations are participating in the operation.

Barzilla and Minnie Robinette bought the farm in 1911 while Barzilla was in his mid-60s. He was followed by Edward, who was born in 1889. Jim came along in 1927 and has two siblings. Ed, Bill, and John came along in the 1960s. They are now the owners and operators of the farm with the help of all the family members, the newest member being a week old and the first in the 6th generation. Jim and Bethel will surely be missed by their family, friends, and customers.

This year’s maze design includes the 1929 Model A with the “big apple” in the truck bed. The Model A has been in many parades over the years. The maze officially opens Sept. 1.

Tickets may be purchased at the farm at 3142 4 Mile Rd, NE in Grand Rapids.

For more information, visit robinettes.com or follow Robinette’s on social media at www.facebook.com/robinettes, Instagram.com/robinettesapplehaus, and twitter.com/robinettes.

From the outside, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display looks like the MacBook Pro we’ve come to know from the recent past. The major changes to the laptop are only apparent once you start using the machine: increased speed, and a new Force Touch trackpad that provides new input functionality.

The changes are most certainly welcomed, but overall, they may not be enough for anyone who bought a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro within the past three years to upgrade. But if you’re laptop is older, or you’re thinking about upgrading from a MacBook Air, you’ll see great benefits.

The new Force Touch trackpad

When you press it, the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro’s Force Touch trackpad feels like it clicks, but the click you actually feel is haptic—technology is used to create a sensation of clicking. For longtime MacBook users, you can notice a difference when the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro is off: You can still click a trackpad on an older MacBook that’s powered off, but tap on the Force Touch trackpad and it feels dead, like you’re pressing against the laptop case itself.

The Force Touch trackpad has sensors to detect how hard you’re pressing. You can press to click like you normally would, but you can also perform a Force Click by pressing a little harder; you’ll feel a second, more pronounced click. Force Click has different functions; it can be used for Quick Look in the Finder; Force Click on a date and a pop-up appear to add an event to Calendar; it can activate Look Up; it shows a preview when you Force Click a web link; and much more.

I’ve always used the trackpad as a last resort. I prefer a mouse because my fingers fumble when I have to do things like click and drag to select part of an image or a section of text. But Force Click has me using the trackpad more often because it’s so useful. I don’t see myself ditching the mouse soon, but I could be using it less and less.

What else is new with the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display

The other updates are inside the laptop. Apple replaced the Intel Haswell processors in the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro with new Broadwell processors.

The $1299 laptop has a dual-core 2.7GHz Core i5 processor, with Turbo Boost support up to 3.1GHz, 3MB of shared L3 cache, and 128GB of flash storage. The $1499 model has the same processor as the $1299 version, but it has 256GB of flash storage. The $1799 model has a 2.9GHz Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost support up to 3.3GHz, and 512GB of flash storage.

(On a side note, Apple updated the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro during this review process. We’ll have a review of those laptops coming soon.)

Along with the processor upgrade comes a graphics upgrade. The new Intel Iris Graphics 6100 is still an integrated graphics processor, but Apple says it’s 40 percent faster than the Iris Graphics 5100 integrated graphics in the previous Retina MacBook Pro. Apple also says the flash storage is also up to two times faster than before.

Last but not least, Apple says the it has improved the battery life of the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, touting ten hours of “wireless web” use and 12 hours of iTunes movie playback. The previous model was rated at 9 hours for both use cases. (Battery life will be addressed in a separate article.)

Performance

As expected the performance difference between the new 2.7GHz and the 2.9GHz Retina MacBook Pro is marginal, with the 2.9GHz laptop about 5 percent faster than the 2.7GHz laptop in Geekbench 3 tests. But remember, the price difference between these models doesn’t just cover the processor upgrade; it also includes more flash storage capacity.

Even when compared to last year’s 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, the new models are only 7 percent faster than the older laptops they respectively replace. In order to see gains over 10 percent, you have to compare the new laptop to models released in 2013.

The graphics improvement is much more impressive: The new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro had a 29 percent increase over last year’s models in the Cinebench OpenGL tests. It’s not the 40 percent that Apple touts, but Apple’s testing was done with a different benchmark that includes three video games.

In the Black Magic Disk Speed Test, the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro posted an average write speed of 1156.1 MBps and an average read speed of 1299.9 MBps.

Bottom line

I’ve always been a fan of the MacBook Pro with Retina display. Though, my personal preference is for the 15-inch model, the 13-inch modeled I tested are attractive laptops in their own right. If you have an older non-Retina Mac laptop, it’s a good time to upgrade. Obviously, you’ll see a huge performance boost, but you’ll also be wowed by the Retina display and the Force Touch trackpad is cool. (If you’re sticking to your older Mac laptop because of its matte display, you’ll be disappointed to find that Apple no longer has a matte display option. It’s glossy only.)

However, if you bought a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro in the past couple of years, you might want to stick with your laptop a bit longer, since you may not consider the speed gains worth the expense. The Force Touch trackpad is a great new feature, but it’s not vital to your workflow and not enough reason alone to upgrade.