|
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Really sucks to see how awesome the new MBP is. It's too bad the
| CSAM scandal had to happen; never buying another Apple product
| again because of that shit.
| ajvs wrote:
| And heaer I thought I was the only person who just can't get
| enthused about their new MacBooks, knowing that CSAM could just
| get added at any point in the future without my consent.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Stockholm syndrome doesn't look like Stockholm syndrome.
|
| Everyone cheering apple on for making the laptop they should have
| made in 2016. Wow! No Touch Bar it's so much better.
|
| Semi replaceable batteries! How great. The funny thing is, if
| they had dropped the ports on this generation instead of the
| last, less people would have cared.
| destitude wrote:
| I still remember when you didn't even have to open up the "MBP"
| and could replace the battery directly from the bottom. Even had
| green led indicator to show how much charge it had directly on
| the battery case.
| irae wrote:
| Maybe you also remember batteries wore terrible, especially
| durability. It was quite common to see people replacing
| batteries on less than 1 year old laptops. Nowadays batteries
| easily endure 2 to 5 years without becoming useless. Sure,
| there are still memory issues and reducing total time over the
| years. But replacement is required way less often.
| pengaru wrote:
| lipo pouch batteries are not durable, they swell up and
| deform housings quite often... all it takes is heat.
| r00fus wrote:
| Man, I wish they would go back to having battery indicator on
| the case again. Truly miss that as I don't want to wake it just
| to find out if I need to seek a plug.
| hwbehrens wrote:
| Wow, I totally forgot about that period. I recall that I used
| to plug in my laptop when I arrived at my desk, then _remove
| the battery_ to ensure that it was running exclusively on wall
| power in an effort to improve battery health. I never did have
| to replace that battery...
| latortuga wrote:
| Was this MBP era or iBook/PowerBook era? I seem to recall this
| being the case on the old Titanium Powerbooks in the early 00s.
|
| Remember the glowing light near the laptop latch that would
| slowly swell to tell you that your laptop was asleep?
| lostgame wrote:
| There was a MacBook Pro era - even a couple Unibody revisions
| - that kept the easy user replaceable battery intact.
|
| The Unibody had this lovely latch mechanism that also allowed
| you to easily replace your hard drive and/or RAM.
|
| God, I miss those days. :(
| r00fus wrote:
| Yup my beautiful 2008 "ALU" MBP had this. Was very sleek.
| lostgame wrote:
| Those were the days. I remember replacing the battery on my
| iBook G4 when it died. :)
| usui wrote:
| Ease of being able to replace the battery has never been the
| reason stopping me from upgrading from a 2015 MacBook Pro. Anyone
| with the the intent of replacing a battery today will be able to
| make it after buying some readily available tools.
|
| What I need is the ability to swap out my SSD in the laptop,
| either for data retrieval, backing up, or upgrades. Unfortunately
| good removeable storage seems to be a thing of the past. I say
| "good" because I don't want to boot the newest MBP off a slow SD
| card.
| major505 wrote:
| Well, this is great. Because, while I don`t like to admit they
| launch a lot of trends that other manufactures tend to follow.
| Hope they go the same way.
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| replaceable battery and permanent surveillance ?
| [deleted]
| busymom0 wrote:
| > We removed the trackpad and, lo and behold, there are cut-outs
| to access the pull tabs that hold the middle battery cells in
| place.
|
| That's not exactly what I was expecting based on the headline.
| Still seems pretty complicated.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Thank you, frame.work - https://frame.work/ - this is what
| happens when there is real competition and innovation in the
| market.
| pzo wrote:
| I wouldn't call it as easily repairable as frame.work -
| frame.work doesn't use those glue white strips instead they
| just have few screws and you can remove such battery without
| struggle.
|
| I once changed battery in my old iphone SE and it's a real pain
| if such white strips break - and they are sooo thin that it's
| really easy to break. Once it breaks you have to use heat gun
| and fishing line as improvised saw to cut battery from the
| case.
|
| BTW My old macbook 15'' pro 2012 unibody had only screws and
| easily removable battery
| webmobdev wrote:
| Same here - I had to use a hair dryer and dental floss to
| "saw" through the adhesive strip once it broke off ... damn
| near took me around 30 - 40 minutes! (And some HP laptops
| don't even need screws but provide sliding buttons to easily
| "unlock" and remove / change the battery).
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I've never heard of this. Only one of my casual tech blog
| reading or coding friends have. I don't think Apple would do
| something because of such a small competitor. The Wikipedia
| entry for it only has an introduction section.
| benbristow wrote:
| It's gotten a bit more media attention recently as Linus (of
| Tech Tips/YouTube fame, not Linux/Git fame) has made a rather
| large investment in them and has been talking about them a
| lot on his platforms.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSxbc1IN9Gg
| skinnymuch wrote:
| It said his investment is $200K-ish. His YouTube stuff
| seems insanely popular, so he invested a couple weeks of
| profit at most?
| benbristow wrote:
| I have no idea of his financials but that does sound like
| more than a few weeks of profit. Remember he has a lot of
| staff to pay, the huge office/studio space and bills for
| that and running stuff like the LTT Store which will have
| expenses also. And then supporting his family on top of
| that.
| monocasa wrote:
| I imagine the LTT Store is a net positive with fantastic
| margins.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| They're a competitor by definition, but not by any practical
| consideration.
|
| Despite seeming like a great company and product they probably
| sell fewer machines and have less mindshare than the $19 Apple
| cleaning cloth.
|
| Since all laptops previously had and some still have
| replaceable batteries, including Apple, I'm also curious how
| Framework gets credit for this innovation?
| desiarnezjr wrote:
| By bucking the trend and good PR really. Framework is
| interesting, but in reality reminds me of when Thinkpads were
| still tank-like workhorses that were quasi self-servicable
| over decade a ago. For the most part, you could swap
| components out, which is Framework's whole schtick.
|
| The ship has sailed on replaceable RAM and storage IMO,
| because most of us want the performance increases that losing
| upgradability brings. It's a trade-off but one that's worth
| it in the long run.
| Jcowell wrote:
| I sincerely doubt framework was even a factor in the decision
| making of whether or not MacBook batteries should be follow
| iPhones already existing design.
| brianwawok wrote:
| 100%. It was probably due to some EU lawsuit or other, and
| rather than make 2 designs (US / EU), they just changed the
| design to make everyone happy.
|
| It's weird that US companies basically need to be sued by the
| EU for stuff to be consumer friendly..
| webmobdev wrote:
| > _I sincerely doubt framework was even a factor in the
| decision making_ ...
|
| Oh, you may be surprised at how closely Apple watches and
| reacts to PR and its competitors - it's one of the things
| they do right and are really good at. Some examples:
|
| 1. After Apple's very successful launch of the iPhone, they
| got a huge shock in Europe when Jolla, a small, new startup
| of ex-Nokia employees launched a phone with a new mobile OS
| that _outsold_ the iPhone. When Apple realised that Jolla 's
| marketing emphasised "user privacy", Apple strategically
| _temporarily_ shelved its plan to collect user data (for
| which it was getting bad PR) and even pretended to abandon
| their advertising platform. And that worked out very well for
| them because luckily for them Jolla was mismanaged, and
| failed.
|
| 2. Frame.work has received highly positive reviews from both
| the media and users / patrons all of whom have acknowledged
| and appreciated the creativity and innovative use of existing
| technology to create a highly repairable laptop. While it may
| not have outsold any Mac device yet, the PR buzz it has
| generated has focused public spotlight back on right-to-
| repair and created new awareness and appreciation for
| repairable electronics. Invariably, comparison has been made
| with Apple's popular yet deliberately hard-to-repair devices
| and you can bet that it has made Apple quite uncomfortable.
| (With regulators breathing down their neck about right-to-
| repair, the last thing Apple needs is an innovative
| competitor that tauts repairability as a feature).
|
| 3. When Apple released a Mac Mini with soldered RAM and SSD,
| the criticism and poor sales forced them to backtrack and
| release the next Mac Mini with replaceable RAM. (Again, a
| temporary strategic withdrawal).
|
| 4. The current and new Apple iPhones size and design are
| inspired by Sony mobiles phones, one of the few companies in
| the world that still has their own design division and
| produces amazing phones with great hardware.
|
| 5. The whole "thin device" craze at Apple was inspired by a
| Motorola phone. (And ofcourse, it remains popular as it aids
| their "planned obsolescence" goal for their devices).
|
| I am not completely disparaging Apple - reacting to PR and
| their competitors is something giants sometimes ignore at
| their peril. But Apple doesn't, and they cleverly calibrate
| their strategy to maintain their competitive lead.
|
| (I'd even say the article linked to is just a fluff piece
| trying to convey the impression that the new Apple laptop is
| suddenly a more easy to repair device because the battery is
| no longer glued like before but uses stretchable adhesive :).
| I recently repaired an iPhone SE and the battery adhesive
| broke as I was pulling it carefully and after that it was a
| real pain to remove it without damaging anything - easy to
| repair, my ass.)
| desiarnezjr wrote:
| So in just a few months Apple pivoted all their years of
| planning, engineering, design, supply chain and production
| for the new Pros to "compete" with a small startup that
| sells probably less in total than what Apple might sell in
| 12 minutes?
|
| Right...
|
| Snark aside, the 2021 Pros seem well balanced between
| moving things forward hardware wise, and still offering
| enough I/O. They're likely not perfect at all, and for me
| the M1 Air is more than enough.
|
| But all those things - planning, engineering, design and
| supply chain and last mile distribution take years to
| execute on, not weeks or months.
| benbristow wrote:
| Hi, Linus! :P
| drclau wrote:
| AFAIK, replacing the battery on the previous generation meant
| replacing the top part of the body, to which the battery was
| glued. That included replacing the keyboard and the touchpad (not
| 100% sure if the old keyboard and touchpad could have been kept;
| maybe they were replaced just because of the damage done to them
| by the expanding batteries). At the same time, the previous
| generation had battery problems and keyboard problems (as pointed
| out in sub-comments), which meant many were replaced for free
| even out of warranty (as it happened to me due to faulty
| battery).
|
| I suspect someone at Apple realized how much would have been
| saved if only the battery was not glued to the case.
|
| Edit: mentioned the keyboard problem, which would result in
| replacing the battery too it seems.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| It had the nice side effect that I got a brand new battery
| every time I had a single janky keyboard key. My battery is
| always nearly-new! :)
| hedgehog wrote:
| Same, but then the last time the battery went bad (swelling)
| with only about 30 cycles on it.
| martinko wrote:
| I suspect that they see the right to repair movement and are
| trying to preempt it, at least to an extent.
| gregoriol wrote:
| It's probably just that replacing too many parts when one
| breaks was getting too costly for them
| stuff4ben wrote:
| You know, it could be both...
| eli wrote:
| Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but adding convenient
| pull tabs really does feel like a shift in direction to at
| least be less hostile to non-Apple or DIY replacements.
| They could have easily opted for a special battery removal
| tool.
| rasz wrote:
| What good are pull tabs when you cant buy original
| replacement battery(1)?
|
| /1 without giving up your business books for 5 years
| selling your customers privacy, and giving up ability to
| do component level repair.
| samwillis wrote:
| I wander if the new keyboard design with plastic rather than
| aluminium between the keys will also make it easer to replace
| it too, it almost looks like the module that could be swapped.
| I'm sure we will find out from iFixit soon!
|
| I suppose it also means that the top case is no longer tied to
| different keyword layouts, fewer SKUs. That will have helped
| cut costs!
|
| (written on a 2019MPB with duff ender key)
| dsego wrote:
| it's a black anodized aluminum inset from what I can find
| online
| selykg wrote:
| This is also how I got two new batteries replacements when I
| had to send my MBP in for keyboard replacement due to the
| stupid thing breaking (repeatedly).
|
| Each time the system showed 0 cycles on the battery and I
| basically got a nice reset. Loved that part of it at least.
| egypturnash wrote:
| hahaha, my 2016 MBP chews through batteries - I'm on my
| fourth, I think - and every time I get a new battery it comes
| with a new keyboard, so I haven't had any of the keyboard
| problems some are plagued with.
| chrischen wrote:
| Yep I had annual keyboard replacements on all the butterfly
| macs I owned. I considered it a nice feature that the keyboard
| had this defect because it also meant a free annual battery
| replacement.
| bityard wrote:
| I wonder if all of the recent interest in right-to-repair laws
| by various states impacted the new design.
| grishka wrote:
| That's what "authorized service providers" do. Unauthorized
| ones do replace just the battery by ungluing the old one.
| tobias2014 wrote:
| The article says "reasonably DIY-friendly". I think this is an
| important distinction. Just because the battery has pull tabs
| doesn't mean that it's easy to get to that point.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| A lot of comments seem focused on the incentives to apple and
| what's motivating the change. All fair questions. To me, though,
| it feels like just a radically different approach this year.
|
| 2016 macbook felt like leadership got in a room and said "okay,
| let's make a list of all the sexy things we can think of that
| would make the macbook unique". This netted things like thin-
| beyond-practicality, touchbar, removing all the ports, etc.
|
| 2021 macbook feels like leadership got in a room and said "okay,
| let's make a list of all the top things everybody is complaining
| about most." And they just fixed everything (well, most things)
| on that list one-by-one.
| EEMac wrote:
| If you create a problem, people will beg you to sell them the
| solution.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Like Coca Cola's New Coke solution.
| bluescrn wrote:
| It was all going well until somebody said 'let's have a notch!'
| when they'd already decided not to add face ID...
| rbanffy wrote:
| I feel that, on the ports and touchbar side, this was a step
| backwards. The SD slot is a good thing, but the replacement of
| one USB-C with a (vintage) HDMI port and the addition of a
| proprietary power connector is a leap backwards in time.
|
| The Touchbar was my daughter's favorite - an Emoji keyboard. It
| also did a lot more - bringing up manpages in the terminal,
| having app-specific buttons (no need to hunt down the Zoom
| window to mute). People wanted an ESC key and they got it
| eventually. I couldn't care less about function keys. I get it
| was _very_ expensive for the little if offered, but, still, it
| 's still useful. More useful than F1 to F12 ever were.
|
| Magsafe is nice from a safety standpoint (I have a kid and work
| from the couch sometimes), but with all-day battery life, what
| is the use of it? On my desk, the Mac is plugged into power,
| two external monitors, ethernet, keyboard and trackpad with a
| single cable, as God intended it to be. That's 3 free USB-C
| connectors for anything else (such as the external storage) and
| there is one power brick that lives in my backpack along a pair
| of US/EU adapters for when I need to travel. With USB-C power,
| it was nice to have the Dell and the Mac sharing power bricks
| when needed (if I said that 10 years ago, I would laugh myself
| out of the room)
|
| I like the replaceable battery, but I miss the touchbar and
| actively dislike the reintroduction of Magsafe.
| FabHK wrote:
| > bringing up manpages in the terminal
|
| Ha, that was one of my use cases as well. Not an extremely
| compelling one, though, to be fair. (^[?]? does the trick
| with a keyboard shortcut).
| matwood wrote:
| > Magsafe is nice from a safety standpoint (I have a kid and
| work from the couch sometimes), but with all-day battery
| life, what is the use of it?
|
| I was having a similar discussion the other day. MagSafe was
| amazing when my Intel MBP had to basically be tethered to
| power all the time. My M1 MBA only ever gets charged at my
| desk plugged into a dock/monitor. MagSafe was great when it
| was needed, but its time is passing.
| boardwaalk wrote:
| The MagSafe connector is just USB-C on the other side, so
| it's almost just a form factor thing (though obviously it
| doesn't support data).
|
| And you can still power the thing over USB-C (alongside
| data), just not at the same wattage/no quick charge. It's
| perfectly serviceable unless you're doing something really
| punishing.
|
| The only problem I've had so far is getting a two monitors
| working with my particular USB-C dock (it works with an Intel
| MacBook). Hopefully it's a software/firmware thing, because I
| enjoy the single cable life as well.
| rbanffy wrote:
| If it completely replaced the USB-C port and made the power
| brick also an Ethernet interface, I'd love it. USB-C minus
| data isn't what I'd expect from USB-C.
| johncalvinyoung wrote:
| my only real disappointments with the new MBPs so far, on
| paper (haven't received mine yet) have to do with
| networking. I was really hoping the new MagSafe would be
| precisely that, data+power with ethernet in the power
| brick. I'd have recommended adding 140W bricks to every
| desk in our office if that had been the case.
|
| And while I understand the chipset availability
| limitations, 2x2 802.11ax will at best nearly equal the
| performance of my 2017 MBP in my current 3x3ac
| deployment. Guess I'll have to hurry up transitioning to
| ax.
| ArchOversight wrote:
| It was a known limitation of the M1 that it only supported
| one external display even if your Thunderbolt dock
| supported two displays.
|
| The M1 simply couldn't push more pixels.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| This is false. It has nothing to do with pushing pixels.
| Else it should be easily be able to handle 4 Full HD
| monitors instead of a single 4k monitor.
| JoshGlazebrook wrote:
| Vintage in what sense? HDMI is literally one of, if not the
| most common types of display ports on TVs, Monitors, game
| consoles, etc. I think most people would choose a straight
| HDMI to HDMI connection over trying to find the right
| USB-C/lighting/whatever cable to fit their needs (which is
| very hard to actually do). The HDMI port has stayed the same
| for a long time, yet new HDMI specs come out every few years
| expanding the capabilities.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I was being a bit cruel. It's an HDMI 2.0 port, which is
| useful for presentations (a USB-C to HDMI dongle lives in
| my backpack for that reason). 2.0 will drive a 4K monitor
| at 60 fps. Never tried that, but, IIRC, the original USB-C
| port (and HDMI 2.1) could do it at 120 fps (which, for my
| terminals, would be... totally overkill, just like 60 fps
| already is).
| giobox wrote:
| While I agree HDMI 2.0 on a new for 2021 machine is an
| odd choice, displays can still be connected to the
| Thunderbolt 4 ports much like the previous gen. Apple's
| spec sheet says two external monitors at 6k/60hz
| supported this way via TB4.
|
| All of this is to point out, has anyone confirmed 4k/120
| on the thunderbolt port? Given the 2x6k monitor output 4k
| @ 120hz sounds like it should be possible, unless Apple
| have nerfed the output.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Apple's spec sheet says two external monitors at
| 6k/60hz supported this way via TB4.
|
| It's 2 for the Pro but 4 for the Max (technically 3 plus
| I think 4K@60, because that's the limit of the hdmi
| port).
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| Ports tend to be common until Apple deprecates them.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Apple is still one of the large personal computer
| manufacturers.
| bitwize wrote:
| Nevertheless, when Apple excludes a port the other OEMs
| start wondering whether that port is necessary or if
| they're including it out of blind convention.
|
| Likewise, when Apple champions a non-proprietary port on
| their PCs, other manufacturers tend to follow suit.
|
| Apple is more than just another large OEM. They are _the_
| standard bearer for the personal computing industry. They
| have tremendous influence over what a computing device
| looks like and how it connects to peripherals and other
| machines. (WiFi was largely a lab experiment before Apple
| 's AirPort.)
| [deleted]
| notyourwork wrote:
| What's wrong with a USB-C to HDMI cable if you need that
| connectivity?
| handrous wrote:
| You can pick up a 2015 MacBook and walk away carrying
| nothing else, and handle a wide variety of situations
| that may occur. Three things enable this: long battery
| life (don't need your brick); a touchpad that's not
| absolute hell to use for more than a minute or two at a
| time (don't need an external mouse); and port selection.
| Need something off Bill in marketing's USB stick (it'll
| be USB-A, almost certainly, even in 2021, let alone
| 2016)? Need to plug into a TV or projector, or even just
| a normal monitor that's not super-duper-new? HDMI is far
| and away your best bet, especially if you're not carrying
| your own cables. Photographer has some pictures for you
| that need to go on the web site (or you _are_ the
| photographer)? SDCard reader, no problem.
|
| That ease-of-use--just pick it up and walk away, you
| don't even need to think about it--is significantly
| weakened if you need a few special cables and dongles to
| be similarly-well-prepared.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| This is why I never upgraded from my 2015 MBP. I'm still
| using it everyday, God forbid it breaks. My next laptop
| will be something else entirely, with Linux on it.
| notyourwork wrote:
| I mean let's be honest, how many of us are road warriors
| that need every single type of connectivity known to
| exist? Having a single port type on your device
| simplifies one half of the equation.
|
| Your device's ports are a casualty of the lack of
| standard data port. The HDMI on displays makes you feel
| like you need an HDMI on your laptop, I disagree if my
| USB-C port can do that AND a whole bunch of other things.
| myelin wrote:
| With my 2014 MBP, my Windows laptop, or my Chromebook, I
| can plug straight into a hotel TV and watch a movie from
| my laptop. With my 2019 MBP, I need an adapter.
|
| This doesn't seem like a big deal, but the first time I
| went on vacation with my family after getting the 2019
| MBP, I forgot that I needed to pack the adapter, and we
| couldn't watch whatever series we were currently binging
| on Netflix or HBO, which was pretty annoying. I'm happy
| to see HDMI ports showing up on more laptops these days!
| handrous wrote:
| > I'm happy to see HDMI ports showing up on more laptops
| these days!
|
| HDMI is going to be especially sticky, and great to have
| built-in, for _years_ to come, most likely. AFAIK USB-C
| _cannot_ replace it, because, like most data cables that
| aren 't HDMI or Ethernet, it has really, really short
| max-length limitations. Meanwhile, HDMI can have runs of
| 20+ meters and work totally fine, no repeaters or
| anything. If you're building in a ceiling projector, or
| have a TV at one end of a room but the connection in a
| conference table, you _will_ use HDMI. Something might
| replace it, but it 'll be a cable we've not heard of yet,
| not USB-C.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| You can send USB C and/or Thunderbolt over fiber. It's
| rather expensive as of now, but it's possible.
|
| Example 50m cable: https://www.rockshop.de/corning-
| thunderbolt-3-optical-cable-...
| masklinn wrote:
| Despite intensely disliking meetings I regularly get
| pulled into them, and having to go back to your desk to
| get an adapter wastes everybody's time and makes you look
| like an idiot.
|
| It also requires carrying an adapter at all times just in
| case.
|
| > Your device's ports are a casualty of the lack of
| standard data port
|
| To my great dismay HDMI is the standard video port,
| that's why it got added back.
|
| > The HDMI on displays makes you feel like you need an
| HDMI on your laptop
|
| No, what makes them feel that is that every video input
| aside from specifically desk-top computer displays is
| HDMI.
| spockz wrote:
| And this is why our meeting rooms have either usb-c
| called directly for video or an hdmi to usb-c adapter tie
| wrapped to the hdmi cable.
| notyourwork wrote:
| We used to have other cable's for video prior. However,
| today we expect interoperability across so many more
| devices that saying we need this to be a video cable and
| this to be an audio cable put us in this position in
| first place.
|
| Over time I imagine we will evolve to a more standard
| "data transfer" cable that is what USB-C is trying to do.
| The transition isn't always easy and will introduce
| friction to various use cases.
|
| Remember firewire? Today when I'm mobile I have a
| bookbag, a laptop and a small accessory bag. The
| accessory bag has various cables, dongles and adapters to
| ensure I have plug-ability.
|
| Going back to your desk is a work problem, the office
| should just have those dongles in all the conference
| rooms and the problem you describe is entirely moot.
| handrous wrote:
| > Going back to your desk is a work problem, the office
| should just have those dongles in all the conference
| rooms and the problem you describe is entirely moot.
|
| You run into this a lot places where only some developers
| and maybe the artists use MacBooks. Everyone else has fat
| Windows machines that have every port known to man and
| don't need dongles. Past the initial (annoying and
| unnecessary, but oh well) adjustment period, it wasn't
| _that_ bad for all-Mac shops, but it 's a real pain in
| mixed shops because it's basically _just_ a MacBook
| problem.
| handrous wrote:
| > I mean let's be honest, how many of us are road
| warriors that need every single type of connectivity
| known to exist?
|
| Road warrior? It also meant you could grab it and go to
| the _conference room_ and not have to take anything else
| with you, or go back to your desk for something. Packing
| for a business trip? _Maybe_ you need to throw the power
| brick in the bag. That 's all. Every single type? It had,
| what, five, including the rather niche Thunderbolt ports?
| _Those_ are what should have become USB-C ports, as that
| change would have been 100% an improvement. Keep the
| rest, including USB-A, which might _finally_ not be the
| most useful USB port to have in, oh, 2030 or so, if
| trends continue. Should be right about the time USB-C is
| being replaced ( "Can you believe anyone ever thought
| that cable situation was OK? LOL.")
|
| > Having a single port type on your device simplifies one
| half of the equation.
|
| I don't think it's been most people's experience that
| having only USB-C makes their device _simpler_ to use
| with a broad range of peripherals, even ~5 years after
| Apple went all-in on it.
| notyourwork wrote:
| I'm not sure I see it, the same.
|
| At home I have a CalDigit docking station. One cable to
| my laptop, and I get power, video to a second monitor,
| digital audio connection to a DAC for audiophile quality
| headphones, SD card reader if I really need it and wired
| ethernet. The laptop still has 3 open USB-C ports. How is
| it not beautiful that a single cable takes care of all of
| that. Sure, we've had docking stations forever but they
| weren't single cable, they looked like cash registers you
| have to literally sit your laptop in to get the same
| level of connectivity.
|
| When I'm traveling I have a few cables for various
| scenarios and adapters. USB-C to HDMI for video, also
| works for my iPad so it serves two purposes. I don't use
| SD-cards on the road so this isn't a problem for me but a
| USB or USB-C or whatever to SD-card reader isn't bulky
| enough to gripe about for traveling.
|
| At work conference rooms can simply provide the needed
| connectors so when I disconnect from my desk and end up
| in a conference room I still have the connectivity I
| need.
| handrous wrote:
| I definitely agree that USB-C makes a great connector for
| workstation-type docking situations, if you're getting to
| pick all the hardware for that purpose (which is what
| I've done, too).
|
| > USB-C to HDMI for video, also works for my iPad so it
| serves two purposes.
|
| I get why they didn't do it at first (lower-end models
| exist in part to use up parts from previous higher-end
| models, so you can't just change them all on day one) but
| it's crazy to me that they're still shipping iOS devices
| of any kind with Lightning ports. The dongle thing would
| have been less annoying if I could at least use the same
| dongles on _all_ my (new) Apple devices, iOS and MacOS
| alike. As it is, only my 4th-gen iPad Pro has it. [edit]
| And man, is it so frustrating that they 've almost
| achieved a situation where you can travel with one brick
| and one cable to provide power for your laptop _and_
| phone _and_ a tablet... but no, they kept putting out new
| Lightning devices for years.
| jaywalk wrote:
| When Apple finally ditches Lightning on the iPhone,
| people are going to raise holy hell. That's probably the
| only reason it's still there.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Yes. Luckily I fetched up at that place around 2015 - so
| I was given the best MacBook Pro ever made, and the best
| iPhone ever made - the 5S. Shame to have to give it all
| back really.
|
| Still baffles me why there was no hash key though.
| cycomanic wrote:
| It seems that you're not in a line of work where people
| give a lot of presentations. Where I work it was almost a
| certain that at the beginning of some presentation
| session one mac speaker had to ask if someone had an
| adapter because they lost/forgot... theirs. If lucky
| another speaker was on a mac as well and has an adapter,
| otherwise someone has to go find an adapter somewhere
| notatoad wrote:
| it's great if you have one. doesn't work so well if you
| don't have one.
|
| HDMI is great because whatever random TV you want to
| connect to probably already has some other device plugged
| in with a 6' HDMI cable that you can steal.
| zzyzxd wrote:
| The proprietary power connector is not a leap backwards in
| time. The current generation of USB-C spec just can't provide
| more than 100W PD charging, which the 16 inch model needs.
| masklinn wrote:
| > I feel that, on the ports and touchbar side, this was a
| step backwards. The SD slot is a good thing, but the
| replacement of one USB-C with a (vintage) HDMI port and the
| addition of a proprietary power connector is a leap backwards
| in time.
|
| Just because it's a leap backwards doesn't mean it's bad.
| Sometimes changes are not good and backtracking is.
|
| * HDMI inputs are in super common world in the professional
| world, it's become the standard for all video projection or
| conference room TVs (unless you still have an even more
| ancient VGA) and having to carry adapters to meetings or to
| give talks is a pain in the ass. It's also pretty much the
| standard for digital audio (since Apple also removed SPDIF).
|
| * The touchbar was shit, it could have been OK as an
| _addition_ to function keys, but it precluded any and all
| muscle memory and quick access to featues. "More useful than
| F1 to F12 ever were." isn't even remotely true.
|
| * And not all users are at your desk, that the laptop has
| "all day battery life" (as long as you only watch youtube
| videos, you're not going to get 11h battery life if you're
| actively working with demanding software) doesn't mean people
| won't need to charge them at places which are not _your
| desk_. Plenty of people work on kitchen tables and whatnot,
| with the power cable in the way and yankable by a pet, a
| child, or just somebody going through.
|
| > On my desk, the Mac is plugged into power, two external
| monitors, ethernet, keyboard and trackpad with a single
| cable, as God intended it to be. That's 3 free USB-C
| connectors for anything else (such as the external storage)
| and there is one power brick that lives in my backpack along
| a pair of US/EU adapters for when I need to travel. With
| USB-C power, it was nice to have the Dell and the Mac sharing
| power bricks when needed (if I said that 10 years ago, I
| would laugh myself out of the room)
|
| Certainly I can't see how you could ever survive with only 2
| free USB-C connectors left. Poor you.
| least wrote:
| > * The touchbar was shit, it could have been OK as an
| addition to function keys, but it precluded any and all
| muscle memory and quick access to featues. "More useful
| than F1 to F12 ever were." isn't even remotely true.
|
| I mean, the F1-F12 keys are so mostly useless that the
| majority of laptops require you to press a modifier to use
| them as such. They replaced them with functions that are
| more broadly useful to most people: media keys, brightness
| control, keyboard back lighting, etc. I mostly agree that
| _those_ keys are easier to use than the touchbar, though.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > The Touchbar was my daughter's favorite - an Emoji keyboard
|
| This is the Macbook _Pro_ , they shouldn't be optimizing for
| children's love of emojis. I get what you're saying about
| your other usages of it, but I hate the Touchbar with the
| heat of a thousand suns, and given that Apple _did_ decide to
| remove it on the Pro I 'm guessing my sentiment was in the
| majority.
| Spivak wrote:
| I don't get this charicterization where professionals don't
| have fun or use those childish whimsical things like
| emojis. By a huge huge margin I use more emojis at work
| than anywhere else and having a keyboard for them is quite
| nice.
|
| The Touch Bar is infinitely more useful than the function
| key row -- volume and brightness sliders are way better
| than "louder" and "brighter" buttons. Answering calls with
| the bar is easier than mousing over to the Teams
| notification.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Even when using emojis, I am extremely serious and
| professional.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I may or may not have (ab)used mine as an emoji keyboard
| after realizing Github Enterprise could deal with emojis
| just fine.
| hbn wrote:
| Cmd+ctrl+space
|
| You can then search for whatever emoji you want and hit
| enter without taking your eyes off the screen or your
| fingers off the keyboard. Typing emojis was never a
| problem in macOS that the touchbar needed to solve
| crazysim wrote:
| The default fn key with globe icon by itself keystroke
| works as well on the newer MacBooks.
| rymate1234 wrote:
| To be fair you can still charge the new macbooks via USB C if
| you want, and magsafe in this iteration is just a USB C to
| magsafe cable now
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| And yet Apple's laptops STILL don't have a real Delete key.
| Just a Backspace key mislabeled "delete," while everyone else
| manages to fit a Delete key onto even small keyboards.
|
| There was never an excuse for it, but when the Eject key became
| pointless and Apple still didn't fix the problem... it became
| classic, infantile Apple pettiness.
| felixbraun wrote:
| So looking forward to the next version of iPhone 4 -- hopes
| higher than ever
| waynesonfire wrote:
| > "okay, let's make a list of all the sexy things we can think
| of that would make the macbook unique"
|
| what are we talking about here? pussy right?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuTvA1_NNSo
| brightball wrote:
| Is the hard disk / SSD / NVMe still soldered to the board?
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| To summarize: the MBP no longer has a "hard disk".
|
| It has flash memory that is coupled with the SoC.
|
| This is to make the memory bottleneck tolerable (considering
| the cpu and ram move 400GB/s)
| colechristensen wrote:
| I replaced one of the (honestly I don't know what to call
| them... gumstick sized ssd?) in a MacBook that had it as a
| separate component and it was a bad idea. It required an
| adapter board, some large proportion of available products on
| the market weren't compatible, and even with one that was
| there was still occasional strange behavior. Soldering in was
| the least of the problems.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| "blade style drive" -> M.2
|
| I also replaced the SSD in my 15" MacBook Pro 2014, and
| currently use a 4 TB M.2 drive.
|
| When a replacement battery fried my logic board, I didn't
| lose my data. It didn't take multiple hours to re-clone
| from backup; I just used a screwdriver to move the SSD over
| to my spare laptop (13" Pro 2015).
|
| A computer for me is primarily a data storage and retrieval
| device. Data loss is an existential risk to it. Data
| security doesn't bother me as much as it does other people;
| once the hardware is accessible, all bets are off anyway. I
| do get some strange behaviour with the new SSD (periodic
| weekly crash/reboot) but still accept that in order to have
| the larger capacity (4 TB is much more than the 512 GB when
| the laptop was new).
| fouc wrote:
| I did a similar replacement and it was a great idea! But
| you had to pick the right adapter, also the 2015 MBP had
| the least compatibility issues.
| gregoriol wrote:
| There are still a few things left for 2022 models
| masklinn wrote:
| MBPs haven't had a "hard drive" to solder on in a few years:
| the "T2" security chip is also the SSD controller, managing
| the "freestanding" flash chips (which are soldered onto the
| board). The SSD isn't a separate thing at all.
| mehrdada wrote:
| That, however, does not prevent the flash chips from being
| removable. Sure you would not be able to access the data,
| but could replace/upgrade the flash without throwing away
| the computer _when_ they fail. In fact that exists in a
| real T2 product: Mac Pro. You won 't be able to replace it
| with off the shelf NVMe though.
| rbanffy wrote:
| If you go to the other extreme of the spectrum, to the eMMC-
| based laptops, they are also soldered to the motherboard.
|
| Which is really a shame (I have one Acer Aspire laptop and I
| mount /var/log as tmpfs without swap so it doesn't devour the
| eMMC like the RPis do with SD cards)
| masklinn wrote:
| I fear 2016 MBP was Jony Ive unimpeded by practical concerns.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Good riddence of him.
| masklinn wrote:
| He still works with Apple as an independent stylist (Apple
| is LoveFrom's primary client), but likely not with the
| seniority and off-hands approach from others he had as
| chief design officers, which clearly was an issue with no
| Jobs to oversee.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Courage!
| poo-yie wrote:
| Well said! Now they need to do the same with macOS.
| elicash wrote:
| This meeting, however, probably would have been in like 2017.
| We're just seeing the results now.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| That would be nice, but would mean reversing all the decisions
| from 2016. Also, I'm happy about having more ports, but not all
| my devices are USB-C, especially pendrives. A noticeable part
| of my routine is dealing with various dongles just because
| someone thought they will decide what I need and in which
| direction I should be pushed. In the meantime, all other
| vendors continue to support USB-A.
| notyourwork wrote:
| It seems I fall in the minority but I've become quite fond of
| the touchbar. Its a dynamic user input, if my phone rings I can
| touch answer on my touchbar to pick it up, if I want to seek or
| scroll on a spotify song I can do that with a touch and slide.
|
| I don't see the dislike for it.
| sgt wrote:
| That's the only thing I use the touch bar for (I have a 2018
| MBP); to hit the red button after a FaceTime call.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I love my touchbar. Until it freezes. Then I am whining that
| I want F keys back.
| elboru wrote:
| Touch feedback is important for a lot of us. Specially when
| I'm concentrated while debugging something, I don't want to
| have to look at my keyboard. But I see value for other use
| cases, maybe having both the touchbar plus the F keys would
| have worked fine?
| matwood wrote:
| I was indifferent to the Touch Bar, but Apple needed to
| release an external keyboard with it if they really wanted it
| to catch on. I just never took the time to figure out good
| use cases since I could _only_ use them when using the laptop
| keyboard.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I can dream. Mechanical keyboard with carefully implemented
| Touch Bar and Touch ID. Sign me up and take my money. But
| Apple seems to only want to make external keyboards that
| use laptop keys.
| fouc wrote:
| That makes total sense actually, I'm surprised they never
| released an external keyboard with a Touch Bar
| Tsiklon wrote:
| I think an external keyboard with the Touch Bar would
| have been incredibly expensive. The one that ships on the
| laptops was wired into the T1/T2 chips and ran a custom
| version of iOS. Effectively an interface to a second
| built in computer
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| IIRC the dislike was mostly driven by the touchbar
| substituting for physical F keys. If they somehow managed to
| have both, I suspect people would be happy.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| I already have a dynamic interface to control: the one on the
| display. Having the "keyboard" change throws off my intuition
| on where to place my fingers and how to interact.
|
| Looking down at the touchbar each time to assess what the
| current interface is adds a tiny amount of additional
| overhead to my interactions that I dislike. It's not
| _terrible_, but it's not my preference.
|
| I also really dislike the lack of tactile feedback.
| papito wrote:
| Once you start using it for autocomplete in a text field, the
| touch bar is pretty cool. You also can glance at it during a
| zoom meeting to see if you are muted. RIP.
| handrous wrote:
| > I don't see the dislike for it.
|
| 1) You can't really make it part of your muscle-memory
| workflow if you use an external keyboard more than a very
| small percentage of the time, rendering it nearly useless for
| lots of people, right out of the gate.
|
| 2) Some of us discovered we _barely_ brush the Touch Bar
| (F-key) area while typing certain keys (numbers, for me,
| which means also all the symbols that are on the number
| keys). This meant we had to all-but disable the damn thing to
| keep it from opening iTunes and doing other crap, apparently
| "at random" but actually because our fingers were straying
| 0.01mm onto the Touch Bar without our realizing it. Result, a
| fair percentage of users had to force like 3/4 of the bar to
| be empty all the time, or else face constant irritation when
| using the built-in keyboard.
| timeon wrote:
| 1) we are talking about MBP - it is just under the screen
| you will always see them.
|
| 2) I get it but comparing to desktop keyboard F-keys are
| dead without Fn-key so unlike Touch Bar mbp f-keys are not
| on par with desktop keyboard.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I'm able to tolerate #1, but #2 definitely makes it suck
| for me. Haptics and requiring some pressure would have made
| the touchbar much easier to not hate.
| handrous wrote:
| Right, I'm not necessarily anti-touchbar _as an idea_
| (though I also wouldn 't pay any amount of money to gain
| even some hypothetical good version of it) and wasn't
| _that_ bothered by losing the F-keys, but as implemented
| it was harmful for me, not even neutral, so I lost my
| F-keys and all I gained in return was an extra step to
| set up a new MacBook (set Touch Bar to one static mode
| rather than context-sensitive, then replace most of it
| with "spacer" elements).
| christkv wrote:
| This of this. Made me strip the touchbar of all the icons I
| could on the left side.
| cletus wrote:
| The 2016 wasn't leadership, it was Johnny Ive without Steve
| Jobs bringing him back to reality.
|
| Touch Bar? This was nothing more than adding expense to raise
| the ASP (Average Selling Price) of Macbooks, that had fallen
| precipitously low from a shareholder perspective because of the
| superb value-for-money proposition that was the 13" Macbook
| Air.
|
| The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width
| for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and
| less reliability.
|
| USB-C only was a philosophical move rather than a practical one
| that forced people everywhere to carry dongles. The USB-C cable
| situation was and continues to be a nightmare as different
| cables support different subsets of data, power and video and,
| worse yet, different versions of each of those. Worst of all,
| it was the loss of the much-beloved MagSafe. Also, the ports
| weren't all the same. You were better off charging from the
| right (IIRC) rather than the left.
|
| Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful. Personally
| I don't believe this was about forcing users to pay for
| upgrades primarily. It was about shaving off a small amount of
| volume.
|
| Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed
| or at least significantly amended. This is no accident.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I'm quite happy about the move to USB-C and changed all my
| stuff to it as soon as possible. 5 years ago I had several
| micro usb and mini usb chargers, some of them broken. On a
| regular base I had to buy new chargers and cables. The
| MagSafe power supply cables broke easily (but yes, the port
| was nice). Now there's just one cable for everything, I still
| have 2 phone fast chargers but both actually work. Also I can
| just charge my phone without searching for the charger and
| the laptop can be connected to screen/keyboard with just 1
| USB-C cable.
|
| After all, Apple were also the first to sell Desktops without
| Floppy or Optical drive.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful.
| Personally I don't believe this was about forcing users to
| pay for upgrades primarily. It was about shaving off a small
| amount of volume.
|
| Louis Rossman gets a lot of things wrong because he does not
| have a computer engineering background. For example, he does
| not understand why Apple used SPI on the Macbook Air instead
| of USB despite it having USB capability. I had to correct him
| to explain that when your design goal is extreme power
| saving, you have to cut everything including running your
| data over SPI instead of a more power hungry USB bus.
|
| Furthermore one reason they ship soldered on Ram is
| technical. It has been explained here from time to time that
| they are achieving much higher memory bandwidth with the
| memory modules they are using and it necessitates being
| soldered on. If the design goal is to build the most
| responsive laptop while maintaining excellent power savings,
| then this is the right approach to take.
| grishka wrote:
| I can understand the soldred RAM on M1 -- yes, speed of
| light and other laws of physics get in the way. But why
| solder the SSD? What's the technical benefit of _that_ over
| putting an M.2 slot in there or something? How do you
| recover your data if you spill coffee on your laptop? What
| involved simply yoinking the SSD out of the slot now
| requires a fully working motherboard.
| jacobolus wrote:
| This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence.
|
| The touch bar is a very flexible (effectively) analog input +
| rich display device. If adequately supported by software it
| can be an amazing input, affording a range of useful
| functions not replicable with discrete buttons. In general, I
| really wish modern computers had more analog inputs
| available. Analog knobs, jog wheels, sliders, trackballs,
| etc. are tragically missing.
|
| I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and no
| evidence that including it had anything to with making
| laptops expensive as a goal.
|
| The problem with the touch bar is that (a) it only shipped on
| a limited subset of devices so software authors could not
| depend on it, (b) after its initial functions, Apple made
| limited effort to adopt it in all of their own software,
| improve its integration into the system, or push boundaries
| of what it could do as an input device.
|
| > _The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the
| width for a worse user experience with a higher production
| cost and less reliability._
|
| No, this was some Apple-internal mechanical engineering group
| trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could,
| but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between reliability in
| a prototype vs. full-scale factory production + poor
| estimation of reliability in a wide variety of contexts over
| a longer period of time. Nobody ever set out to make a "worse
| experience" or higher cost.
|
| There are many suboptimal features of the common rubber dome
| + scissor stabilizer laptop keyboards, and I wish more
| companies were brave enough to experiment with alternative
| designs in search of improvements. (Disclaimer: my favorite
| "laptop" keyboards are
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2_portable_computers and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable)
| saghm wrote:
| > No, this was some Apple-internal mechanical engineering
| group trying to design the best extremely thin keyboard
| they could, but getting bitten hard by a mismatch between
| reliability in a prototype vs. full-scale factory
| production + poor estimation of reliability in a wide
| variety of contexts over a longer period of time
|
| Okay, but...what caused them to try to make a keyboard that
| thin in the first place? GP is suggesting that it was
| driven by Ive, which you dispute, but you only give an
| alternative explanation for the "what", not the "why".
| tarsinge wrote:
| > The touch bar is a very flexible (effectively) analog
| input + rich display device.
|
| It just can't work with people like me that never look down
| at their keyboard. I'm not trying to be elitist, it's the
| honest truth. I wanted to love the Touch Bar, tried plugins
| like Pock, but in the end no matter how hard I tried I
| can't help and force myself and interrupt what I'm doing to
| look down, it just doesn't make sense.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| It might have worked with some kind of haptic feedback
| device?
| diskzero wrote:
| It was tried. Many, many people spent many, many hours
| inside of Apple trying to make the Touchbar more useful.
| The simple fact was that looking down at it was a context
| shift and, in general, no one wanted to do it. It exposed
| functionality that you would eventually learn to drive
| from the keyboard.
| RobertDeNiro wrote:
| You're not meant to look at your keyboard. It's simply
| not efficient.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I actually really like the TouchBar _except_ for the
| dramatic input lag. The input lag is so damn high that I
| never ever use it. If you could swipe left /right on it
| without holding down first, as on an iPhone, and if touch
| events generally had the same responsiveness as on an
| iPhone, I think everyone would have loved it much more. RIP
| TouchBar.
| Zelizz wrote:
| I used BetterTouchTool to add a second volume slider with
| no delay and no on-screen UI, for changing the volume
| while I watch something :)
|
| I highly recommend using BetterTouchTool to get the most
| out of it if you still have a device with the touch bar.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| > Analog knobs, jog wheels, sliders, trackballs, etc. are
| tragically missing.
|
| Fwiw they are readily available by way of USB (e.g. MIDI)
| controllers. There are loads of dedicated knobs, faders,
| pads, etc. with a large amount of software to customize and
| translate those inputs (in addition to the array of
| software supporting them natively)
|
| Obviously that would be external to the computer, but I
| think given the highly specific nature of analog controls
| it makes sense for these to be external. I'm having
| difficulty imaging a set of analog controls that would be
| at the same time universally useful and efficient in terms
| of weight and space utilization.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > Headphone jack? Gone. Ethernet port? Gone. VGA port?
| Gone. Floppy disk drive? Gone.
|
| Also the parallel port. I remember the drama!
|
| It goes the other way, too. When Apple put cameras in all
| of their laptops, the press relentlessly bashed them for
| wasting BOM on something so useless and expensive. Then the
| industry realized it was a good idea and followed suit.
| Similar for retina displays -- the term "High Definition"
| had become synonymous with "good enough" and ground PC
| monitor advancements to a halt for a decade. Phones were
| coming out with higher resolutions (not pixel densities,
| resolutions) than full-size monitors. Then Apple figured
| out how to market higher resolutions, the press mocked them
| for wasting money, but word got around that HD might not be
| the end-all of display technology and consumer panel
| resolutions started to climb again.
|
| Here's a counterexample, a niche that could really use the
| Apple Bump but hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it:
| 10 gigabit ethernet. 1GbE became synonymous with "good
| enough" and got so thoroughly stuck in a rut that now it's
| very typical to see 1GbE deployed alongside a handful of 10
| gigabit USB ports and a NVMe drive that could saturate the
| sad, old 1GbE port many times over.
|
| Sometimes taking risks results in a Touch Bar or Butterfly
| Keys. That's just the nature of risks. The only way to have
| a 100% feature win rate is to limit yourself to copying
| features that someone else has proven out, but if everyone
| does that then the industry gets stuck in a rut.
|
| I'm glad Apple exists, even if I don't personally feel the
| need to fund their experiments.
| PostThisTooFast wrote:
| Lumping the headphone jack in with VGA and floppies is a
| tired, bullshit tactic. Speakers (and our ears) are
| driven by ANALOG signals. The phone, as long as it
| produces sound, will need to contain a D/A converter and
| an amp. Removing the headphone jack is simply a petty,
| anti-customer denial of electrical access to something
| that the device is already doing.
|
| Now we have to have redundant D/A converters in every
| sound-reproduction device. The result is totally
| unpredictable (and often shitty) sound quality, the
| opposite (but totally predictable) result from what
| apologists were touting when defending this rip-off.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > 1GbE became synonymous with "good enough" and got so
| thoroughly stuck in a rut that now it's very typical to
| see 1GbE deployed alongside a handful of 10 gigabit USB
| ports and a NVMe drive that could saturate the sad, old
| 1GbE port many times over.
|
| This has a few reasons:
|
| - 10 GbE was, until quite recently, pretty power
| intensive and it still is more expensive and hot than
| gigabit
|
| - Devices in LAN, especially those with high bandwidth
| usage, have become far rarer. A lot has moved to the
| cloud and the bandwidth of most people can't saturate 100
| Mbit, not to speak of Gigabit.
|
| - LAN as a whole has become rarer. A lot of people now
| only use WiFi with their phones or laptops, up to the
| point that most people now have (theoretically) faster
| WiFi than LAN.
|
| Combined, there are few reasons to take the expense of
| putting a high-speed ethernet port on a device. Luckily,
| the introduction of 2.5GbE and 5GbE has decreased the
| jump a bit and you see those ports on a few consumer
| devices now.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > 10 GbE was, until quite recently, pretty power
| intensive and it still is more expensive and hot than
| gigabit
|
| PCIe 3.0 transceivers were 8Gb/s and supported
| preemphasis and equalization, closing the sophistication
| gap with their off-backplane counterparts. How many
| PCIe3+ transceivers has the average person been running
| (or leaving idle) for the last decade? These days a
| typical processor has 16Gb transceivers by the dozens and
| 10Gb hardened transceivers by the handful. I just counted
| my 10Gb+ transceivers -- I have 36 and am using... 10
| (EDIT: 8/4 more, HDMI is 4x12Gb/s these days).
|
| The reason why 10GbE is expensive has nothing to do with
| technology, nothing to do with marginal expense, nothing
| to do with power, and everything to do with market
| structure. Computer manufacturers don't want to move
| until modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers move and
| modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers don't want to move
| until computer manufacturers move.
|
| These snags don't take much to develop, just "A needs B,
| B needs A," and bang, the horizontally segmented
| marketplace is completely immobilized. That's why the
| market needs vertical players like Apple who can push out
| A and B at the same time and cut through these snags, or
| high-margin players like Apple who can deploy A without B
| and wait for B to catch up. Otherwise these market snags
| can murder entire product segments, like we've seen
| happen to LAN.
|
| No, it isn't because of reduced demand. People are
| recording and editing video more than ever, taking more
| pictures than ever, streaming more than ever, downloading
| hard-drive busting games more than ever, and so on. LAN
| appliances would have eaten a much healthier chunk of
| this pie if LAN didn't suck so hard, but it does, so here
| we are.
|
| > Luckily, the introduction of 2.5GbE and 5GbE has
| decreased the jump a bit
|
| Yaay, PCIe 2.0 speeds. 2003 called, it wants its
| transceivers back :P
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Power is a big differentiation. You need to send 10GbE
| over 100m (some break the standard and only offer 30).
| Have you ever touched a 10GbE SFP module or the heat sink
| of a card? They're quite hot and you need to provide that
| energy, which is not a problem on a desktop, but a big
| one on a laptop. If the laptop has RJ45, that is.
|
| > modem/router/ap/nas manufacturers don't want to move
| until computer manufacturers move
|
| Modems and routers only make sense once they serve a link
| that is actually beyond 1Gbit - which is rare even today.
| Also, these devices are minimal and the hardware required
| to actually route 10Gbit is a lot more expensive. Even
| Mikrotiks cheaper offerings today can't do so with many
| routes or a lot of small packages (no offense to them,
| their stuff is great and I'm a happy customer - it's
| still true, though).
|
| APs are a bit different, as WiFi recently "breached" the
| Gbit wall (under perfect conditions). But there are
| already quite a few with 2.5Gbit ports to actually use
| that.
|
| NAS, on the other hand, are a bit held back by the
| market. Still, high-models have offered either 10Gbit
| directly or a PCIe-slot for a long time now.
|
| > People are recording and editing video more than ever,
| taking more pictures than ever, streaming more than ever,
| downloading hard-drive busting games more than ever, and
| so on. LAN appliances would have eaten a much healthier
| chunk of this pie if LAN didn't suck so hard, but it
| does, so here we are.
|
| The professional video editing studios with shared server
| are already on 10 Gbit LAN, the stuff has been available
| for years. Pretty cheap even, if you buy used SFP+ cards.
| Switching was expensive until recently, but I'd say that
| the number of people which need a 10G link to a lot of
| computers are even less.
|
| And LAN competes with flaky, data-limited, expensive 100
| MBit lines (if you're lucky). 1GbE is beyond awesome
| compared to that and yet it lost, anyway.
|
| > Yaay, PCIe 2.0 speeds. 2003 called, it wants its
| transceivers back :P
|
| I'm not happy, either, but its better to at least go
| beyond Gigabit speed rather than stay stagnant even
| longer.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Are you really suggesting that PCIe and ethernet are
| equivalent? There are so many differences, starting with
| the distance...
| devonkim wrote:
| 10 GbE is still iffy even with CAT6 cabling over copper
| which complicates deployments and user experience. As a
| result, prosumer type devices like recent AMD x570
| motherboards and the upcoming Intel Z690 based ones are
| including 2.5 GbE ports that are rated to work over CAT5E
| and provides enough bandwidth for a few hundred GBps with
| a lot less power usage on the switch side (something like
| < 4w / port seems common) and makes it easier for low
| cost passively cooled switches to work alongside a
| switching SoC that doesn't need to be terribly
| sophisticated to hit the latency requirements needed to
| support 2.5 GbE.
| fleventynine wrote:
| 10GBASE-T is power hungry and unreliable, but dirt-cheap
| 10GBASE-LR and 25GBASE-LR transceivers work great up to
| 10km. If only they could figure out how to fit the
| transceivers into mobile-friendly packaging. But for a
| workstation they're great.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| That's true, I actually run fiber in my home for that
| reason. I think the problem with fiber is, though, that
| the technology is pretty unknown to consumers and working
| with fibers is a lot harder than working with cables;
| they take a lot less abuse before breaking, for example.
| But if someone is going for 10Gbit+ in their home
| network, I can highly recommend fiber.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > Combined, there are few reasons to take the expense of
| putting a high-speed ethernet port on a device. Luckily,
| the introduction of 2.5GbE and 5GbE has decreased the
| jump a bit and you see those ports on a few consumer
| devices now.
|
| I think the only thing driving 2.5/5/10GbE at all is that
| WiFi Access Points need it.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Compare the cooler for a 2.5GbE card [0] to that of a 10
| GbE card. The fact that WiFi (which is what most
| consumers use) now supports those speeds surely helps,
| but 2.5GbE is also simply far easier to integrate and
| power.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.de/XIAOLO-Netzwerkadapter-
| Unterstutzung-L...
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.de/XG-C100C-Netzwerkkarte-
| RJ45-Port-802-3...
| birdman3131 wrote:
| The scary part? 1GbE is older than I thought. A couple
| weeks ago I replaced a 1GbE switch (gs524t) at my work
| and got curious. Said model came out in 2001 or 2002.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Copper gigabit Ethernet is about as old as USB 1.1.
| bluedino wrote:
| >> Also the parallel port. I remember the drama!
|
| Printers I can see. An entry-level HP LaserJet was $600
| back in 2000, something not as easily replaced as a
| serial mouse or gamepad.
|
| >> a niche that could really use the Apple Bump but
| hasn't gotten it and probably won't get it: 10 gigabit
| ethernet.
|
| They stuck it on the Mac Mini
| my123 wrote:
| As a $100 additional option...
|
| (which granted, isn't too bad compared to the price of a
| _new_ 10GbE card, but still...)
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| I thought the touchbar was great idea but I hated that the
| function keys (and especially esc for a while) were
| sacrificed for it. They could have taken that 1cm of
| vertical space from the ridiculously huge touchpad instead
| and given us a ridiculously huge touchpad along with
| function keys and a touchbar.
| stack_framer wrote:
| > This is pure speculation, ungrounded from any evidence.
|
| It's not ungrounded from the _anecdotal_ evidence that
| these changes are coming after Ive 's departure.
|
| > I have seen no evidence that Jony Ive was its patron, and
| no evidence that including it had anything to with making
| laptops expensive as a goal.
|
| Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title is
| "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with you.
| When your company releases an updated design to an existing
| product, you had some kind of say in that design. Period.
| Even if your "say" was just that you were aware of it, and
| didn't veto it.
| [deleted]
| BoorishBears wrote:
| > Holy, evidence Batman! Leadership 101: When your title
| is "Chief Design Officer", the design buck stops with
| you. When your company releases an updated design to an
| existing product, you had some kind of say in that
| design. Period. Even if your "say" was just that you were
| aware of it, and didn't veto it.
|
| This is just shifting goalposts because you got called
| out.
|
| You didn't word your comment as "these things happened on
| Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like Ives
| was personally pushing for something.
|
| It's a common refrain on HN and it's never backed with
| proof.
|
| And speaking of your first comment:
|
| > Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been
| reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no
| accident.
|
| ... you realize that this is a new generation of MBP
| landing on the exact same cadence they've come out on in
| the last few decades?
|
| So it makes perfect sense to have drastic changes land
| now regardless of who's in charge?
|
| Not mention the fact it hasn't even been two full years
| since Ives left. And the fact the HDMI port was coming
| back leaked at the start of the year.
|
| So unless you seriously think Apple designs a laptop in
| the course of a single year, it's highly unlikely he had
| no input on the current machine.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > You didn't word your comment as "these things happened
| on Ive's watch" you consistently word your comment like
| Ives was personally pushing for something.
|
| This is not a meaningful difference when he's in charge
| and it's a flagship product.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I knew this would be the response, and it's _utter_
| nonsense.
|
| But definitely extra points for trying to act like it
| being a flagship is why maybe this is an exception.
|
| -
|
| Flagship product or not, people do not say "Sundar Pichai
| recently made an unliked change to YouTube" despite his
| Director role
|
| People do not say "Kevin Scott's new Windows version is
| being disliked" despite him being MS's CTO
|
| > these things happened on Ive's watch
|
| Is a factual statement
|
| > Ives was personally pushing for X.
|
| Is gossip that HNs tell themselves to feel better.
|
| Or is Johnny Ives magically a special case because people
| don't like him?
|
| I mean seriously, if you think being a leader means you
| are personally pushing for every single solution as
| opposed to personally _accepting_ every solution... and
| that you always have the exact same level of personal
| love for everything that you allow, you 've never lead
| anything with any sort of scale.
|
| Being a leader is about compromise, not turning every
| project into a 1:1 reflection of what your preferred
| choices would have been.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You're naming people that are managing entire companies.
|
| The person in charge of _design_ , for a company that has
| a handful of physical products, is a completely different
| situation. It's reasonable to blame them for _top level
| product design decisions_. What happens in that specific
| realm is what they want. The top priority of their job is
| those few dozen decisions. The opposite of a CEO that 's
| overseeing ten thousand different things.
|
| Be a little less stuck on the word 'pushing'. The fact
| is, when it's one of the main things you're in charge of
| choosing, and you allow a decision and then stand by it
| for a long time, you _are_ now pushing it.
|
| Also, wait, you're the one that inserted the word
| 'pushing' into the conversation! If you're upset with
| that wording, you're upset at a strawman.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Kevin Scott is a CTO. He's in charge of _top level
| product technical decisions_
|
| The top priority of his job is those few dozen decisions.
|
| Be a little less stuck on the word "Director". The fact
| is, when you're one of the main people in charge of
| allowing decisions, it's not the same as personally
| championing them.
|
| -
|
| > Also, wait, you're the one that inserted the word
| 'pushing' into the conversation! If you're upset with
| that wording, you're upset at a strawman.
|
| You know you can just read the comment I referred to
| right if you've already forgotten right?
|
| _The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the
| width for a worse user experience with a higher
| production cost and less reliability._
|
| Does that sound like personally assigning blame to Johnny
| Ive for something? It'd be one thing if it said Ive's
| team or something, but it's the common refrain parroted
| on this site
|
| -
|
| If John manages Joe and Joe deletes a database in prod,
| do you say "John's subordinate deleted a database in
| prod" or do you say "John deleted a database in prod".
|
| You see how there's a difference there even though both
| acknowledge that John has a part in what happened?
|
| It's not that complicated to see the difference if you've
| ever interacted with any sort of situation where the buck
| _actually_ stopped with leadership, but I guess that 's
| not universal.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Kevin Scott is a CTO. He's in charge of top level
| product technical decisions
|
| Then it's probably fair to blame him for some high-level
| decisions. But technical decisions go well beyond design,
| and microsoft has _so many_ products, so it 's harder to
| say how much you can point at him.
|
| > The top priority of his job is those few dozen
| decisions.
|
| I honestly have no idea which few dozen you mean. Across
| all of microsoft? I could list a bunch for "apple product
| design", like the way airpods fit, the decision to have
| no holes in airtags, the keyboard and touch bar choices
| in macbooks, etc.
|
| Maybe the start menu location? You could probably blame
| him for the choice of xbox models too. I'm not singling
| out Apple in saying that executives should be considered
| responsible for certain high-level decisions.
|
| > Be a little less stuck on the word "Director".
|
| I'm stuck on the word "design". He's the design guy.
|
| > The fact is, when you're one of the main people in
| charge of allowing decisions, it's not the same as
| personally championing them.
|
| If it's one of the top few most important decisions under
| your job purview, the difference is so minor as to not
| matter outside the company.
|
| > Does that sound like personally assigning blame to
| Johnny Ive for something? It'd be one thing if it said
| Ive's team or something, but it's the common refrain
| parroted on this site
|
| Assigning him blame is not the same as saying he 'pushed'
| it. The buck stops here for design. He gets the blame
| because he strongly approved it and he could have easily
| spent entire days on the decision because that's the core
| of his job, and spending enough time on the decision is
| also his job.
|
| > If John manages Joe and Joe deletes a database in prod,
| do you say "John's subordinate deleted a database in
| prod" or do you say "John deleted a database in prod".
|
| John decided to delete a database in prod. Ive decided to
| go with this keyboard.
|
| Assuming the delete wasn't accidental, because the
| keyboard definitely wasn't accidental! If it was an
| accident this analogy isn't relevant.
| r00fus wrote:
| Just putting this out there [1] - Steve Jobs would have
| rightfully put responsibility for these design changes
| under the Chief Design Officer.
|
| "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop
| mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed
| when you become a VP."
|
| In other words, you have no excuse for failure. You are
| now responsible for any mistakes that happen, and it
| doesn't matter what you say.
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-
| difference...
| trevyn wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that Jony was ultimately the DRI
| ("directly responsible individual" in Apple-speak) for
| all industrial design, so he "owns" it, which is a bit
| above "signing off" or "accepting", whether or not he was
| personally pushing for something.
|
| This is a bit of a quirk of how Apple structures
| responsibility, and makes it a bit more fair to say that
| "Jony made a disliked change" in a way that doesn't quite
| apply at Google or Microsoft, where responsibility tends
| to be a bit more diffuse.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| DRI has expanded throughout the tech industry, I can't
| remember the last time I was on a team that didn't use
| the concept.
|
| But I provided a simple analogy above.
|
| Say John manages Joe and is the DRI for data storage. If
| Joe goes and deletes the production database, John has
| some blame even though he didn't _personally_ delete the
| database.
|
| Do you not see the difference between saying "John
| deleted production?" and "John's subordinate deleted
| production?"
|
| Both are assigning some blame to John, but only one is
| factually true.
|
| This entire conversations almost feels like the typical
| HN inability to realize the world is not black and white.
|
| It's like people need Johnny Ives to personally have
| opened up a CAD drawing and shrunk the MBP because it's
| utterly impossible that a larger team decided on the
| vision for an entire flagship possible.
|
| -
|
| Lol the replies. What a weird way to dodge a simple
| question lol.
|
| "John's subordinate deleted production" implies that John
| is partially responsible, but accurately reflects he did
| not personally delete it.
|
| You're not even mentioning Joe, you're accurately
| reflecting John was in charge, but you're also not
| _lying_ and saying John did it.
| trevyn wrote:
| "John was responsible for production having been deleted"
| because of the systems and processes he did or did not
| put in place. At a high enough level of abstraction, this
| is all that matters.
|
| Jony was responsible for the Touch Bar.
|
| Anyway, some evidence: "For years, Apple Chief Design
| Officer Jony Ive has expressed a desire for the iPhone to
| appear like a single sheet of glass", suggesting that
| this could have been part of a larger overall design
| direction. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-unlikely-
| to-make-big-chan...)
|
| I'd be willing to bet that they mocked up MacBooks with
| full touchscreen keyboards.
|
| Further, I don't think it's a coincidence that I don't
| mind typing an email (core C-level activity) on an iPad
| on-screen keyboard, but I'd find it infuriating to try to
| code on.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I work at Apple, I'm a senior engineer - been there for
| almost 2 decades. I'm DRI on a few things here and there.
|
| Not a single decision is made on things that I am DRI on
| without me being a part of that decision. I may not get
| my way if I'm over-ruled for corporate reasons, but I
| know about it, and being the DRI, I get a slightly-
| larger-than-average say in what happens. Generally it
| takes a director or VP to over-rule what I want, and then
| the radar is very clearly marked as such.
|
| Apple takes the concept of the DRI very seriously. You
| don't give responsibility without also giving power.
|
| My opinion: There is _zero_ chance (not "a small
| chance", _zero_ chance) that Jony Ive didn 't sign off
| on, and explicitly endorse the Touch Bar. Something that
| obvious, in that commanding a position in the user
| interface would never have escaped his personal input and
| attention.
| bscphil wrote:
| Thank you for saying this, your personal experience here
| is just about the best insight we could ask for.
| Subjectively, there's an odd lack of current Apple
| engineers weighing in on threads here at HN relative to
| other FAANG companies. I've often wondered if the
| company's rules were stricter.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Isn't it well-known that Apple's culture is extremely
| secretive?
| rusk wrote:
| John's subordinate asks John if he should delete
| production. John says go ahead.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design
| buck stops with you.
|
| Agreed with this. When you're coming to the CDO position
| after 20 years of being a hands-on designer at that
| company, most recently as the head of both human
| interface and industrial design across the entire
| organization, and having been described as being the
| person with the most operational power at Apple, after
| Steve Jobs himself, _even before being promoted_ , my
| guess is that these design changes did not sneak under
| his radar. It is most likely that he set the goals that
| produced these designs, and that he was aware of and
| approved of them from the beginning. And I suspect that
| as a new C-level, he was probably even more hands on than
| that.
|
| But since in this thread we are being asked to hold
| ourselves to a very high standard of rigor, I should note
| that I have not submitted this comment to peer review, or
| made my data available for replication at this time. I'm
| just basing this on, you know, how jobs work.
| threeseed wrote:
| > my guess is that these design changes did not sneak
| under his radar
|
| Ive is part of the Senior Leadership Team.
|
| No major decision in the company sneaks under his radar.
|
| But that doesn't mean he is responsible for every
| decision.
| threeseed wrote:
| > When your title is "Chief Design Officer", the design
| buck stops with you.
|
| That's only because in your ignorant reality you have
| made it so.
|
| The actual reality is that what constitutes a product is
| so much more than just the design. For example it
| includes what features should and shouldn't be there. And
| that is a decision largely coming from the Product team.
| Or how it works. Which comes from Hardware Engineering
| team.
| danaris wrote:
| There's a big difference between "Jony Ive, as CDO, must
| have signed off on this, and thus bears responsibility
| for it" and "Jony Ive was pushing for this, for these
| specific reasons".
| Oddskar wrote:
| The touch bar was fingers on glass. It's not appropriate
| for a professional device since it requires you to look
| down and doesn't lend itself to the "mechanical" use of
| devices that high-paced work requires.
|
| Also, you _can_ actually add the analog inputs yourself.
| The DIY keyboard community -- which is flourishing with
| options and new vendors -- has lots of options available. I
| myself have two analog knobs and one trackpoint on my
| keyboard. It 's absolutely amazing.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| If the analog add ons are DIY or even extra money, then
| software developers cannot rely on them being present and
| won't develop good software and use cases for it. At
| least not most of them. The best you can hope for is
| niche software support.
|
| So adding stuff yourself is nice (I do it myself!) but
| not a way to move the industry or even the Apple
| ecosystem forward.
| pdpi wrote:
| Analogue input is pretty much a solved problem. Not only
| do we have standards for game controllers, but also MIDI
| control surfaces give you a wide variety of analogue
| physical controls. MIDI even comes with incredibly rich
| input automation.
|
| Sadly, the only company I'm aware of producing that sort
| of hardware for use outside the music industry seems to
| be Loupedeck.
| Oddskar wrote:
| Niche software support? My keyboard and the analog addons
| works on Mac, Windows and Linux with excellent support
| since it runs QMK firmware.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| How well does this analog input work with, say,
| Photoshop?
| karmelapple wrote:
| I was really hoping Apple had a big leap forward in
| fingers-on-glass interaction planned. Imagine if the
| glass could kind of raise or move down so you could
| "feel" where the buttons were. Heck, even providing a few
| notches in the chassis, above the Touch Bar, for a finger
| to "feel" relatives where it was, and require a harder
| "press" to activate the Touch Bar, would have been likely
| a game changer.
|
| But they didn't. And I was always confused that the Touch
| Bar never got more love from the hardware developers.
|
| That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive
| or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once
| the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to
| do something like that these days though.
|
| It also wasn't easy to build software for the Touch Bar
| from what I could gather. I had lots of ideas for little
| tools (think iStat-like gauges, but perhaps for things
| like the mic input level), but it wasn't very easy to
| build one when I tried.
|
| RIP Touch Bar. You might not be missed too much, but I
| bet something like you will come up again in a decade or
| two.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive
| or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once
| the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to
| do something like that these days though.
|
| I think it was more like they decided to add the
| equivalent of an Apple Watch to Macs to support TouchID
| and then asked "what else can we do with it?".
| diskzero wrote:
| > That definitely makes me wonder if it was pushed by Ive
| or someone at Apple as a pet project, but abandoned once
| the initial development was done. Seemed very Un-Apple to
| do something like that these days though.
|
| Yes. It wasn't Jony. It came from the software side. I
| won't name who to protect the guilty.
| threeseed wrote:
| > It's not appropriate for a professional device since it
| requires you to look down
|
| Apart from developers many professionals do look down all
| the time because they typically have other devices
| connected e.g. synths, photo/video editing rigs.
|
| And Touchbar was designed much more for that audience.
| diskzero wrote:
| I can see how you might make that assumption based on how
| the Touchbar has exposed functionality, but this was not
| the goal of the Touchbar as it was sold internally. It
| was sold as one of the next great UI affordances. It came
| from some of the same people that brought us Mission
| Control, the Dock, Expose, etc. I worked on a lot of
| these features and I never use them. Shame on me.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| My touch bar almost always has "Display Connected:
| [Mirror Displays] [Extend Desktop]" on it. I can fiddle
| around and get it to show app-specific things, or hold Fn
| to see the F keys, but most of the time I'm using it it
| shows those useless multi-monitor buttons.
|
| I'm sure there's some setting somewhere that defaults to
| showing whatever the layout for the in-focus app is, but
| it's failed to make me care enough about it to try to
| figure it out.
| epistasis wrote:
| On a laptop, that "look down" means looking at the bottom
| pixels of the screen.
|
| The looking was never the problem, IMHO, the problem was
| execution and utility. It was actually distracting when
| there was adaptive completion results continually
| flashing. And the rest of the buttons were never great.
|
| If _every_ single dialog box flashed the buttons, that
| would be a win as it is easier and faster to tap the
| touchbar than it is to navigate the cursor and then
| click. But this obvious use case never really
| materialized.
|
| And if, like most "professional" users, the laptop is
| operated via an external keyboard, the muscle memory
| never develops.
| setr wrote:
| > It's not appropriate for a professional device since it
| requires you to look down and doesn't lend itself to the
| "mechanical" use of devices that high-paced work
| requires.
|
| Sure it could; it just has to beat the cost of the
| lookup. If you could have done some complex operation
| trivially with it, that couldn't really be done with some
| keyboard shortcut, being a dynamic visual field would be
| fine.
|
| Of course, volume sliders don't fit that bill, and I
| don't think anyone really found something that did... but
| it's not some fundamental guarantee that it would be
| useless.
| wyre wrote:
| What keyboard do you have with a trackball?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| G80-11800 of course
| Oddskar wrote:
| Oops. Should have been "trackpoint" and not trackball.
| It's a pimoroni trackpoint breakout board.
| evan_ wrote:
| The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard has trackball options:
|
| https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/
| ksec wrote:
| >and no evidence that including it had anything to with
| making laptops expensive as a goal.
|
| It is product differentiation. The MacBook Pro 2016
| redesign was delayed by a year due to Intel's CPU problems.
| The touchbar Macbook also had higher ASP from the start. It
| was the Post PC era. Everyone was suppose to leave the PC (
| including Mac ) platform to Tablet. It doesn't get any
| clearer than that. Even making an iPad ads "What's a
| Computer". Making an ASP increase is a typical move of a
| market where you want to milk it. Did I mention they
| completely neglect Mac Pro for years?
|
| >Jony Ive was its patron
|
| Despite media wants to claim otherwise at the time and had
| shills cover it up. He spend most of his time on Apple
| Retail redesign and Apple Park. But iPhone X and Macbook /
| MacBook Pro was his vision of how the ultimate MacBook Pro
| and iPhone would be as he said so himself. He was named CDO
| in 2015, along with some design team restructuring. The
| "Designed by Apple in California" chronicles 20 years of
| Apple design photo book came out in _2016_. When he finally
| left in 2019, the media and shills were suggesting he hasn
| 't actually been on product design for quite a few years.
| His earlier work on Apple in 2011+ was iOS 7 re-design. (
| After Scott Forstall was out ) And we all know how that
| went as they spend the next 3 years to iterate _out_ of it.
| To the point their old UX design head had to _retire_. And
| if you look at the changes to Apple Retail Store redesign,
| they were the same. Form over function. Partly Jony 's
| fault, partly Angela.
|
| >Nobody ever set out to make a "worse experience" or higher
| cost.
|
| Apple filled many patents where they were looking at
| keyboard on a flat piece of glass with Force Touch and 3D
| Touch. These patents were specific to computer. Higher BOM
| cost are often used as moat in any luxury items.
|
| >to design the best extremely thin keyboard they could...
|
| If it wasn't for the butterfly keyboard. The internet would
| not have a group of people and product reviewer now talking
| about key travel distance. The thin keyboard has a similar
| typing experience as typing on glass......
|
| >There are many suboptimal features...
|
| No one fault them for trying. But the first report of
| keyboard problem came out in _2016_ from MacBook users.
| Less than one year after its launch even before the MacBook
| Pro TouchBar. Apple constantly delete report of the problem
| on its support forum. The whole thing only gotten attention
| when an online press themselves decide to blog about it and
| went viral. That was _2018_. They stopped reporting Mac
| user satisfactory in 2018, both in keynote and in investor
| meeting. It took nearly 3 years of ranting before Tim Cook
| even made a Keyboard Service Program.
|
| Basically without Steve Jobs, no one had the gut to say,
| fuck this. This isn't working. Close it down. Work on a
| alternative or go back to where it was and we make a
| Service Programme. Instead they drag on it for years.
| Without product sensibility and direction.
| sedatk wrote:
| All Apple had to was to have the touch bar over function
| keys, and nobody would complain _at all_.
| edgriebel wrote:
| THIS! Touch bar is cool but when they went and removed
| _the ESC key_ they failed. Both would be ideal
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Touch Bars have had a separate, physical ESC key since
| 2019. I'm looking at one right now.
| sedatk wrote:
| ESC itself doesn't cut it for me. With my resting hand
| position on the keyboard, my fingers touch the touch bar,
| and it always causes something either catastrophic or
| very frustrating. On a similar note, I'd gotten used to
| pressing Fn keys without looking at the keyboard. With
| touch bar, I have to carefully analyze the touch bar
| before doing anything with Fn keys. It's a very
| problematic experience overall. If it was a separate bar,
| I wouldn't have any of these issues.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Due to _years_ of vocal complaints from developers since
| 2016.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure, but "both would be ideal" _exists_. You can have an
| Escape key and Touch Bar, if you want.
| trevyn wrote:
| I think two rows of function keys would be ideal!
|
| Each with a little OLED display, please. (Why hasn't this
| happened yet??)
| dmitriid wrote:
| It's not "ideal". Function keys are exactly that:
| physical keys. Something you can use without looking down
| at your keyboard.
| [deleted]
| wnissen wrote:
| What I always wondered is why they didn't start with a $999
| base model (like the original iBook) that was cheap, but big
| and slow. if you wanted premium
| performance/expandability/ports/screen, you could pay $2K for
| the Pro model in the same form factor. If you wanted
| portability, you could pay $2K for the Air in a smaller form
| factor with the same performance as the iBook. The cheapest
| model being the most portable is bizarre.
|
| Then again, the iPad Mini is more expensive than the larger
| iPad, so obviously there is something going on I don't
| understand. Perhaps the cost of engineering the motherboard
| and battery in an integrated package are so high that they
| can't afford to split the line any further.
|
| The 2021 14" Pro is the first truly pro model in a while. I
| hope they keep it up. The keyboard is actually usable for
| extended periods, it has ports, the screen is great (to be
| fair, all Apple retina screens are great to varying degrees).
| Did I need it? No. But I wanted it. The last Mac laptop I
| bought for myself was the 2015 13" MacBook "Pro", so they're
| getting more money out of me this time around.
| trevyn wrote:
| >the iPad Mini [$499+] is more expensive than the larger
| iPad
|
| Sort of. The $329+ "iPad" has internals that are a few
| generations old, kind of like the iPhone SE. The iPad Air
| ($599+) and iPad Pro ($799+) are the "real" current larger
| iPads.
| nothis wrote:
| I want this to be true but to be honest, I care less about
| the Ive angle than them simply doing it! It seems like
| someone with power said, "hey, what are these letters P, R
| and O standing for, again?".
| dlivingston wrote:
| > Touch Bar? This was nothing more than adding expense to
| raise the ASP
|
| I thought it was a great idea, and I still do, but am so glad
| they removed it. It sounds great on paper, but practically, I
| used it for nothing other than adjusting brightness and
| volume.
|
| > The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the
| width for a worse user experience with a higher production
| cost and less reliability.
|
| Agreed. It really wasn't great. From a design perspective,
| it's quite clever, but from a usability perspective it was
| horrible.
|
| > USB-C only was a philosophical move rather than a practical
| one that forced people everywhere to carry dongles.
|
| Apple has a long, long history of doing this. Headphone jack?
| Gone. Ethernet port? Gone. VGA port? Gone. Floppy disk drive?
| Gone.
|
| I'm fine with it in moderation, frankly. USB-C is so clearly
| the future that where I take offense is that the _rest_ of
| Apple 's lineup doesn't work with it (iPhones, AirPods, some
| iPads, etc.).
|
| > Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful.
|
| Perhaps, but now that RAM is not only part of the SoC but a
| significant reason that the SoC is so good (high bandwidth
| shared memory between CPU and GPU), it's a change I'm more
| than fine with.
|
| > Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been
| reversed or at least significantly amended. This is no
| accident.
|
| Agreed. This finally, truly, feels like a Pro machine:
| "design first" is an approach for consumer products and, to
| Apple's credit, works very nicely on the iPad and iPhone and
| consumer MacBooks (generally). "Design first" for pro
| machines is great for the 3 minutes after opening the box,
| but when trying to do real work, you'd sacrifice all the
| bezels in the world to shave 30% off compile times.
| npongratz wrote:
| > Apple has a long, long history of doing this. Headphone
| jack? Gone. Ethernet port? Gone. VGA port? Gone. Floppy
| disk drive? Gone.
|
| The MBP designers still bravely include the 3.5mm headphone
| jack [0], though it is certainly true that the iPhone
| designers courageously jettisoned the jack.
|
| [0] https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-14-and-16/specs/
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > iPhone designers courageously jettisoned the jack.
|
| There are a LOT of us that still believe this was a
| horrible choice.
| Miraste wrote:
| That was probably sarcasm, Apple was widely mocked for
| referring to the removal as "courageous" at the time.
| npongratz wrote:
| Indeed, I was lampooning their terrible decision to
| remove the headphone jack and their gall to refer to it
| as "courage." I'm still salty about the whole ordeal.
| dwaite wrote:
| That they decided to remove it in the face of many people
| saying it was a terrible decision was exactly why they
| referred to it as "courage". A lot of phones have removed
| it since for most of the same reasons - the modern 3.5mm
| is a pretend spec.
| vmception wrote:
| I've never had any consequence from this except now my
| headphones also dont have the option of being a wired
| headphone, which means I have to ask the flight attendant
| for headphones to watch a movie on their screens.
| Everyone else is in the same situation though so its
| commonplace. Dont know if you've flown anywhere in the
| last year but a lot of people have.
| dlivingston wrote:
| I think most over-ear Bluetooth headphones have the
| ability to also act as wired headphones, via some flavor
| of USB -> Aux cord/adapter.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > The MBP designers still bravely include the 3.5mm
| headphone jack
|
| And in Jony Ive designs they've had it on the wrong side
| for years. The 2021 model finally moves it back the left
| side.
| grishka wrote:
| > Apple has a long, long history of doing this. Headphone
| jack? Gone. Ethernet port? Gone. VGA port? Gone. Floppy
| disk drive? Gone.
|
| There's an important distinction here you're glossing over:
| unreliable, wireless, software-controlled Rube Goldberg-
| esque connections (bluetooth, wifi) can't possibly
| supersede reliable wired ones. Wired connections "just
| work" 99.999999% of the time, and when they don't, you can
| actually see and inspect the thing that connects your
| devices to troubleshoot it. Wireless works only when it
| feels like it.
|
| VGA, on the other hand, was fully superseded by various
| digital video interfaces, and floppies were fully
| superseded by optical media and then various forms of cheap
| flash memory.
|
| And I mean it. People do still miss headphone jacks, and
| people do still buy ethernet dongles for their laptops.
| People don't really miss floppies and CDs.
| timeon wrote:
| You are probably right but if we are talking about Touch Bar
| there are (at least few) people (like me) that prefer it to
| functional keys.
| cmelbye wrote:
| Innovative design doesn't work without an internal champion
| who can rally the company around unconventional ideas. Jobs
| played that role, but now Apple is led by the operations
| team. The word "design" does not appear anywhere on their
| executive leadership page.
|
| Unconventional ideas are inherently risky. They're just not
| worth pursuing if buy-in can't be secured and leadership is
| more focused on compromising to increase profit margins, etc.
| For that reason, it's great (in the short term!) that Apple
| is rehashing known-good designs from a decade ago. However, I
| don't see that strategy working in the long term.
| thedougd wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if folks use rose colored glasses when
| thinking about MagSafe. I don't miss MagSafe and I enjoy the
| interchangeability of chargers.
|
| I could not keep my 13" MacBook plugged in while using it on
| my lap. The MagSafe cord repeatedly fell off when my leg, or
| a pillow bumped into it. My MacBook MagSafe port had black
| marks on it from arcing. At least three times I couldn't get
| it to charge because a metal fragment (once a folded paper
| staple) became magnetically stuck to the receiving side. On
| one of those occasions I couldn't fix it till I got home and
| grabbed some tweezers.
|
| It was a smart solution, but IMO to a tripping problem that
| wasn't widespread.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| No, it's universally loved because it has universally saved
| macbooks from nasty falls. I upgraded to a sans-MagSafe
| 2020 16" MBP when my 2015 MBP had a $600 screen failure. I
| broke the 2020's screen in the first week. Sold it,
| repaired my 2015 and have been happy ever since.
|
| Through all it's faults and problems, I can't shake how
| good my 2015 MacBook Pro has been: great keyboard, MagSafe,
| good enough everything, great keyboard. Did I mention how
| great the keyboard is? It's on my lap right now, purring
| and tethered to power as usual.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, I have none of the experiences that thedougd has
| had, but have had multiple instances of the wire being
| yanked on.
| dsego wrote:
| And the cables were fraying constantly because the
| connector didn't have strain relief and it was using some
| weird rubber compound that crumbled. I had the misfortune
| of having the L-shaped one which was really bad (and they
| knew it because the next iterations returned to T-shaped).
| It didn't disconnect to prevent my macbook from falling
| from my desk and made my relatively new macbook all dented
| and beat up. When that fragile L-connector inevitably
| fractured and failed, and the cable not being detachable, I
| had to spend around hundred dollars to buy a whole new
| power brick. And that one was ruined within a year.
| hamburglar wrote:
| The shape of the MagSafe 1 cord end was better for
| lap/lounging use because it didn't stick directly out as
| far the way MagSafe 2 did. It came out into a fairly low
| profile cylindrical shape that made the cord turn an
| immediate right angle so things didn't lever it over and
| make it fall off.
| trevyn wrote:
| I really missed the orange/green charging/charged LED, I
| was a bit surprised they didn't throw that on a USB-C cable
| or the exterior of the machine.
| GoofballJones wrote:
| Ive was probably cursing at the announcement: "WTF are you
| doing! You're giving people what they want? That's not the
| Apple I left, mate. By this time, in 2021, there should be NO
| ports on the Macbooks, and it should be so thin you could
| shave with it. What the hell is all this?"
| tomxor wrote:
| If Ive had stayed for one more year they probably would
| have been selling 1mm _thick_ rectangles of anodized
| aluminium. There 's probably an Onion report for that.
|
| It's ironic the extremes Apple design has ended up at,
| because there was a point in time (when both Ive and Jobs
| were working together) when Dieter Rams claimed Apple was
| the only company that really followed his ethos, minimalism
| with a critical qualification of honesty, where form
| follows function... but for the last decade it's been more
| like the aesthetic of minimalism at all cost... it's funny
| because that sounds quite a lot like skeuomorphism, it's
| pretentious.
| eloisant wrote:
| Behold, the Macbook Wheel!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
| dylan604 wrote:
| "What the hell is all this?"
|
| It's okay Ive. It's called "something useable" or even, if
| I might be so bold, "something the users want".
| shoto_io wrote:
| How do you know all this? We're you at apple at the time?
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| I don't think apple decided to "undo Ive" immediately,
| though. The 2019 models attempted an incremental fix approach
| - fix the keyboard layout, add a physical escape key - while
| trying to preserve the 2016 features (usb-c only, thinness,
| touchbar). It seems clear that it wasn't until 2021 that
| apple has decided to throw all the crap out entirely.
| clairity wrote:
| i have the 2019 mbp, bought reluctantly earlier this year
| after my 2015 went wonky. based on what i'd heard, i wasn't
| expecting much, but it was clearly an improvement, even if
| it was incremental (touch id, bigger/brighter screen,
| better sound). the biggest obvious lack in the upgrade was
| the performance-battery life tradeoff, which is entirely on
| intel stagnating for over a decade. apple addressed these
| most glaring issues via the combo of m1 and more battery in
| the 2021. usb-c or touch bar were minor issues in
| comparison (that notch tho...).
| cletus wrote:
| Yeah I agree this wasn't a binary switch.
|
| Pure speculation: the forcing function for the big changes
| in the latest models was the M1. That forced a redesign of
| probably the entire unit anyway (eg different thermals,
| chipsets, power requirements, etc). Prior to that the path
| of least resistance was incremental changes and fixes.
| fragmede wrote:
| Where do the 2021 Macbok Pro Intel models fit in?
| danaris wrote:
| What 2021 MacBook Pro Intel models?
|
| As far as I'm aware, the last Intel MBPs were released in
| 2020, and simply continued the 2019 design language.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| The 13" Pro was updated to M1 together with the Air.
| danaris wrote:
| Sorry, still confused. That happened in Nov 2020 (so it's
| not a 2021 model), and it's an M1 (so not an Intel
| model)...so what 2021 Intel MBP is being referred to?
| Toutouxc wrote:
| > forced a redesign of probably the entire unit
|
| Both laptops (Air and 13" Pro) that the M1 launched in
| kept their previous designs. So the switch from Intel to
| Apple Silicon itself wasn't the cause. The switch from M1
| to M1 Pro and Max, maybe. But even the previous Intel
| machines had some serious TDP (and thermal issues), and
| even that wasn't enough to justify a redesign.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's the 2021 model. They were working on this in 2020
| maybe even 2019, but it takes time to deploy. Not that they
| didn't think about it until 2021.
| threeseed wrote:
| > it was Johnny
|
| Again with this rubbish.
|
| I have worked at Apple and Ive does not unilaterally make the
| product decisions in the company. It is a combination of
| Product Marketing, Hardware Engineering, Design, Procurement
| etc and they are all discussed and signed off by the Senior
| Leadership Team.
|
| When you building products at the scale Apple does decisions
| are years in the making. And so they need to make them based
| on what they think the future will be. Mostly they are right
| and sometimes they are wrong e.g. USB-C being the standard
| connector for everything.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| > Also, the ports weren't all the same.
|
| This was the most shocking to me. I learned that the left and
| right side ports run through different buses, but each side
| does not have enough capacity to supply both ports at full
| speed. This mean I had to buy long USB cable to run to the
| other side of my Macbook in order to supply 3 monitors. I
| have a port just sitting unused.
|
| Also, there seems to be a problem with left-side USB ports
| when charging. They cause the system to overheat (or at least
| think it's overheating).
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/04/24/why-
| you...
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > Touch Bar? This was nothing more than adding expense to
| raise the ASP (Average Selling Price) of Macbooks, that had
| fallen precipitously low from a shareholder perspective
| because of the superb value-for-money proposition that was
| the 13" Macbook Air.
|
| If customers don't like the Touch Bar, how does this make any
| sense? If pro users will pay (made-up number) $2000 for a
| MacBook Pro regardless of whether or not it has a Touch Bar
| because it comes with the CPU/GPU they want, adding a Touch
| Bar just decreases the margin.
|
| If the MacBook Air is a better value-for-money proposition
| than the MacBook Pro to begin with, and customers do not
| actually like the Touch Bar, then why would they start
| switching to the MacBook Pro?
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| > If the MacBook Air is a better value-for-money
| proposition than the MacBook Pro to begin with, and
| customers do not actually like the Touch Bar, then why
| would they start switching to the MacBook Pro?
|
| The psychological effects of the word "Pro".
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Right, but the word "Pro" existed before the Touch Bar,
| and as far as we can tell customers did not actually like
| the Touch Bar.
| jollybean wrote:
| Touch Bar I think was a legit attempt at modernization.
|
| Every time I 'see' a touchbar, I want one.
|
| They look cool and useful.
|
| The only reason I don't have one, is because everyone seems
| to indicate they are useless.
|
| It's also possibly a platform issue - maybe they just didn't
| get enough participation etc..
|
| Also - 'thinner' is a rational and generally positive thing,
| it's just that we've reached a threshold where the
| diminishing marginal returns are starting to weigh on other
| things.
|
| Even ports - it's not an aesthetic issue only - they're
| trying to get everyone onto a standard. Frankly, I support
| the notion - I'd love it if everyone just used the same dam
| connector. The reason I don't like my 'USB C only Mac' is
| only because the ecosystem isn't there yet. If the ecosystem
| were there, I'd be fine with it.
| Spivak wrote:
| I'm kinda sad to see the Touch Bar go so fast because I
| have one and actually like it a lot. The variant where it
| has a physical escape key is perfect.
| rudedogg wrote:
| > Touch Bar I think was a legit attempt at modernization.
|
| I agree, I think they're really interesting. The way we
| interact with computers hasn't changed much, and having a
| set of buttons you can configure sounds amazing.
|
| I wish they would have just put it above the physical
| function keys, and deployed it to all MacBooks and wireless
| keyboards. Being limited to just some MacBook Pros probably
| hurt the number of apps that adopted it.
| st-keller wrote:
| Not everyone says the touchbar is useless. I absolutely
| love it! I will miss it. And the new Macbook may be a beast
| but it looks terribly old - like a yesterday-machine. For
| the first time Apple released a product i will buy because
| it will be more capable - but not because i want it!
| wiredfool wrote:
| I think that the touchbar could have been fine if it had
| been spaced one row above a full sized set of function
| keys.
|
| As it is, when I use the keyboard on my work MBP, my
| fingers will brush the touchbar and do things. I have
| turned off the functionality in most apps so that I don't
| get that. (terminal especially)
|
| For my actual usage, it's a step backwards from the
| pre-2016 function keys, an always available
| pause/play/stop, volume and brightness. I can't be doing
| something in emacs and then hit pause or louder, it's
| switch to music and then I can pause.
|
| The lack of a physical escape key also dooms it in my
| usage. (no, escape is not going on caps-lock, that's where
| control goes)
|
| So the work MBP is 99% used with an external
| keyboard/monitor. The personal 2015 MBP is generally used
| on the lap.
|
| USB-c is ok, and the real magic is when you've got a
| Thunderbolt/USB-c power delivery monitor with a built in
| usb3 hub. One wire to the laptop and you're done. (and even
| better when the monitor has a built-in kvm so that the
| other computer is just a switch away, without mucking with
| cables).
| onion2k wrote:
| Apple products are excellent, well built, and they last. If
| they didn't add new things regularly far fewer people would
| buy. I think a lot of the new features on Apple products have
| simply been attempts to make things look different enough to
| be worth buying.
|
| This includes removing the things they've added...
| diskzero wrote:
| People are commenting this post and saying it is speculation,
| and until someone who directly was involved in these
| discussions shows up to comment, I suppose it is.
|
| I have been in design meetings with Jony, and Scott Forstall,
| and many others whose decisions were micromanaged by Steve at
| every step. You can argue that a lot of Steve's design
| decisions were questionable; rich Corinthian leather
| skeumorphism, lickable Aqua widgets, brushed aluminum window
| title bars, but he owned them.
|
| Steve and Jony would sit for hours outside of Caffe Macs
| going over designs. Steve would spend even more time inside
| the industrial design area going over prototypes. He would
| spend a couple of hours every week meeting with every
| software team that had user facing features. He had input on
| almost every pixel on the screen and every
| button/port/display/etc on hardware.
|
| Once he was gone, the drift began. It was inevitable that
| focus would shift. Scott no longer had protection by Steve.
| Jony fixated on the new campus and things like watch bands.
| No one had Steve to rein in whatever impulse they had. Sure,
| people would ask "What would Steve do?" but we also had Tim
| Cook pushing to optimize production, lower cost of goods and
| increase margins.
|
| Apple still has Steve DNA, but it continues to be diluted.
| You may disagree with Steve's vision and opinions, but it was
| strongly held and enforced. I feel almost everything about
| the last generation of MacBook Pros went against what Steve
| would have wanted and I am glad I wasn't there when those
| decisions were made.
| justicezyx wrote:
| Well Steve's is being martyred into a figure head for
| people who disagree with Apple's direction. Often used in
| contradictory situations. For example, one can claim too
| thin being against with Steve, and someone else opposite.
|
| Come-on, that guy has died for 10 years. His opinion on
| anything one cited for is *UNKNOWABLE*. Stop saying he will
| approve or disapprove some ideas... That's literally
| meaningless statement...
| steelframe wrote:
| Whenever someone working at Apple has a Big Idea(TM),
| invoking "This is what Steve would have done" is now
| pretty much a mandatory tactic in arguing your position.
| diskzero wrote:
| Of course you are right. I have a snapshot of Steve in my
| head that I apply, but his opinion changed frequently, as
| evidenced by the various permutations of the OSX
| interface designs.
|
| That being said, I just can't believe he would have been
| happy about the various issues with the old MacBooks. So
| many things feel so wrong.
| lstamour wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that Apple was more responsive,
| faster, with someone like Jobs. There was just a bit more
| push through the company to fix X, Y or Z. It's hard to
| say that any features in particular were delayed for iOS,
| but I think it's possible macOS would have seen a bit
| more churn, arrived at the macOS 11 design sooner, and
| maybe already have a redesign in the works to handle the
| new "notch" at the top.
|
| That said, pure speculation on my part, but I think the
| notch would not have launched on the laptops without some
| other benefit - e.g. Face ID - or it would have been on
| pause until it was small enough to match the current menu
| bar's height. There was sometimes more of a push to get
| things "just so," I think. Either way, I miss the old
| showy product introductions. I like the polish of the
| videos under lockdown, but it feels like the format
| drains the enthusiasm a bit.
|
| And it's hard to point to anything recent, except maybe
| AirPods Pro and recent software releases, where Apple
| really knocked it out of the park. Most Apple hardware
| seems like incremental improvements rather than flashy
| impulse buys. Maybe I'm just more impatient than I used
| to be.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| I'm very curious about a few things - how does someone
| like Steve gain so much respect from so many different
| types of people? Was it the 'we've won before with him,
| so I must believe'? - a Nick Saban like persona. Or was
| it that he was unbelievably empathetic? -- that doesn't
| make sense, because not all empaths are able to rally
| people to a cause due to the bleeding heart syndrome.
|
| I ask because it is almost as if you see the bricks
| change shape at Apple trying to fill the missing piece...
| they know they need that influence, it's just not there,
| and honestly, I want to be a part of an organization that
| operates in the post-kicked out Steve aura.
| dwaite wrote:
| Totally agree - my understanding is Steve Jobs just was
| 100% committed to an opinion, until someone convinced him
| to go 100% in on a different opinion.
|
| I'd also add that with Jony Ive on the way out for years,
| there are a lot of decisions attributed to him that he
| likely did no more than sign off on.
| ksec wrote:
| Pretty much sums up my opinion from 20+ years of following
| Apple.
|
| It is sad. No one knew what to do with Apple Retail. That
| was the most neglected part of business.
|
| Ron Johnson left. Scott Forstall forced out. Katie Cotton
| _retired_. ( I felt both Scott and Katie had a bit of Steve
| Jobs in them ) Mansfield _retired_. It sometimes feel Apple
| is now largely run by Tim Cook and Eddy Cue.
|
| Although the new MacBook Pro do seems to show there are
| people in Apple that still give a damn. That their voice
| may have been previously drown out. Quote from Steve.
|
| >It turns out the same thing can happen in technology
| companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you
| were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better
| copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market
| share, the company's not any more successful.
|
| >So the people that can make the company more successful
| are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the
| companies. And the product people get driven out of the
| decision making forums, and the companies forget what it
| means to make great products. The product sensibility and
| the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic
| position gets rotted out by people running these companies
| that have no conception of a good product versus a bad
| product.
|
| > They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's
| required to take a good idea and turn it into a good
| product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts,
| usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
|
| Really wish Steve was still alive.
| amelius wrote:
| Sorry, but I can't find any sympathy after they squeezed
| every penny out of developers in the app store.
|
| > And they really have no feeling in their hearts,
| usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
|
| Developers are customers too.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _Worst of all, it was the loss of the much-beloved MagSafe._
|
| I wish all of my cables were magnetic, The amount of things I
| have broken in my life by tripping is downright embarrassing.
| I do like being able to charge my mac book from my external
| monitor, and keeping my apple power supply in my bag in-case
| I need to go somewhere. It would just be nice if I didn't
| have to label my cables.
| roland35 wrote:
| It would be nice if there was some sort of standard like
| USB for magnetic charge cables! I do like the standard USB
| c charger that I can use for my laptop, phone, and switch,
| but there are certainly clear advantages to magnetic
| disconnect
| slantyyz wrote:
| I use magnetic tear away cables for a lot of my gear. They
| have magnetic tips for lightning, USB-micro and USB-C.
|
| For stuff like charging headphones, LED lights and other
| random gadgets with mixed plug types, I use charge-only
| cables for that stuff, and it's been super convenient.
|
| There are also magnetic cables that support limited fast
| charging and data, but only at USB 2.0 speeds, so that
| could still be a deal breaker for some people.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| I'm often tempted by magnetic adapters but when I look on
| Amazon at the options, it seems like I always see reviews
| from people who said it nearly caught their stuff on
| fire.
|
| You have any recommendations for high quality magnetic
| gear?
| slantyyz wrote:
| I've used A.S., TopK and Melonboy without any issues.
| hamburglar wrote:
| My experience with magnetic usb-c connectors is that the
| magnet can't be very strong, because then it just pulls
| the adapter out of the port when you try to disconnect
| it.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > it seems like I always see reviews from people who said
| it nearly caught their stuff on fire.
|
| This is part of a larger problem with a lack of
| regulations on high-current accessories. In the US, the
| FTC should probably be doing stringent inspections of
| imported cables, chargers, etc similar to how the FCC
| currently inspects communication devices so the
| substandard/dangerous ones get turned away at the border.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Is the cable going from your laptop to your monitor in a
| position that you can trip on it?
|
| Some kinds of cable really benefit from easily detaching,
| and some don't.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _Is the cable going from your laptop to your monitor in a
| position that you can trip on it?_
|
| Not at my desk, but sometimes when I temporarily plug
| into another monitor or a television it can be a problem.
|
| For my desk, I wish I just had a dock like my thinkpad
| from 10 years ago, or at least if the connectors were on
| the back so I didn't have wires sticking out on both
| sides.
|
| _Some kinds of cable really benefit from easily
| detaching, and some don 't._
|
| It's not like other connectors are difficult to
| disconnect. My previous macbook had an hdmi port that
| would disconnect if i breathed on the cable too hard.
| USB-C does seem a bit more snug so far, but who knows how
| well it will last. Magnets done well just have a better
| chance of surviving if you trip on something, or if you
| drop your laptop.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| USB-C is supposed to be rated for many times more
| insertion cycles than USB-A which is a big bonus in it's
| favour, that said they do tend to get perceivably looser
| over time.
| hamburglar wrote:
| I have one laptop whose usb-c port has loosened up to the
| point where I have to wedge something under the cable on
| the table to create upward pressure in the port or it
| won't charge reliably.
|
| I've been way more impressed with the durability of
| lightning ports. They get dirty and need to be cleaned
| out but their mechanical strength is amazing (apple's
| cables on the other hand...). I like that Apple is
| confident enough in the strength of the lightning port
| that in the Apple stores, the standard display is to have
| the phone being physically supported by the port alone,
| even in an environment where hundreds of careless people
| are going to be messing with it.
| cesarb wrote:
| Another advantage is that USB-C has all the springs on
| the cable, while USB-A has springs on the port. When the
| springs get loose, with USB-C you can just replace the
| cable, while with USB-A, you'd have to replace the port.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| > The USB-C cable situation was and continues to be a
| nightmare as different cables support different subsets of
| data, power and video and, worse yet, different versions of
| each of those.
|
| I'm about to upgrade from a 2015 MBP and am wondering - is
| there a usb-c cable I can buy which works with everything
| guaranteed?
| roflchoppa wrote:
| It's the right thing to do from a service prospective, the last
| design had it built into the top case. I'm sure they hit supply
| issues with all the keyboard failures on the old model. Are the
| speakers in the old model removable? If not more topcase
| constraints ha.
| gregoriol wrote:
| At least you got a new/clean keyboard everytime your battery
| did need service
| supernes wrote:
| They should check if the camera stops working when you replace
| it.
| znpy wrote:
| I wonder if this is the effect of Jony Ive being gone.
| human wrote:
| I have been due to replace my battery on my 2019 MBP (I know,
| yeah...). The problem is not the price (which is steep) but the
| fact that I have to leave << my girlfriend >> at the shop for 3-4
| days. This new design is a game-changer.
| asdff wrote:
| Any apple repair they are going to make you wait. They don't do
| much of anything in the store anymore these days, they just
| scan with their software and send away. No clue why they don't
| image a loaner laptop for you in the meantime. They much such a
| big hubbo about pros using their hardware then they don't offer
| services that pros require for their hardware, like no downtime
| since they can't just tell the client that their rig is out of
| commission for four days.
| r00fus wrote:
| This would be great - they could image your machine & imprint
| onto the replacement with activation/etc even having you
| authenticate AppleID as needed. Is disk-imaging like
| CarbonCopyCloner possible on newer machines?
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| That comment about the new "Apple Polishing Cloth" is hilarious.
| 20$ for a piece of cloth...
|
| Glad the battery is easier to replace, though (speaking from
| experience!)
| mpalczewski wrote:
| The cleaning cloth was sold out immediately.
|
| $20 is a ton for a cleaning cloth, but a small price to pay for
| consumers of apple products.
|
| Here is the alternative (personal experience) 1. You search on
| amazon 2. Get presented with 1000 products 3. Read some
| reviews, wonder if this is the best product for your iPhone,
| will it work on the laptop 4. decide you don't really need a
| cleaning cloth
|
| The apple solution, solves your problem for a price.
|
| I haven't bought the apple cloth, but have and am considering
| it.
| olliej wrote:
| But it's an artisanal cloth made of unicorn fur!
| jjoonathan wrote:
| The lint must be picked one-by-one off the unicorns with
| extra small tweezers that can only be held by child laborers!
| smoldesu wrote:
| Not just any child laborers, mind you: your $20 are getting
| your the finest Uighur and political prisoner labor money
| can buy!
| jangid wrote:
| They are late though. Last year I have switched to Debian because
| of very few DIY repair options in MacBooks. And I discovered OS
| superiority as well. Everything in Debian (Gnome) is so fast -
| opening PDF files, Files (finder), Terminal, EMacs. Debian
| running on i5 is much faster then macOS running on i7.
| dsauerbrun wrote:
| is it faster than osx running on m1 though?
| smoldesu wrote:
| I don't imagine it would make much of a difference, unless
| there's some kind of M1 upgrade kit for older Macbooks I
| never heard of.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Whoah! That's fantastic news for the customers and the
| environment! I was thinking of skipping this model, but now I'm
| sure I'll buy it.
| fsflover wrote:
| It's still not repairable...
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| It seems to me, making batteries difficult to service and replace
| is very consumer-unfriendly--not to mention shitty to the
| environment. So this is definitely step in right direction. Not
| exactly so easy as pulling it out from the bottom like back in
| the day of bricks, but hey.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Does framebook have an easily replaceable battery?
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Depends on your definition of "easy"
|
| https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery+Replacement+Guide/85
|
| It's past my personal definition, but just barely, since it
| involves dealing with a ribbon cable and an apparently fragile
| connection for the battery itself. It's not too bad, but not
| something I want to try and walk someone through if they're not
| used to this sort of thing.
| martini333 wrote:
| The actual content: https://www.ifixit.com/News/54122/macbook-
| pro-2021-teardown
| sulam wrote:
| Thanks for the direct link, it'd be good if the post linked
| here vs a reheated version of the same content.
| gilgoomesh wrote:
| It's been updated to this link, now.
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/27/new-macbook-pro-
| battery-repla..., which points to this.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Thanks, I considered posting the iFixit link but the title of
| that article being "Teardown Teaser: Is the 2021 MacBook Pro
| Repairable?" didn't really convey what I thought would be
| specifically of interest to HN (ie the battery angle which the
| original article chose to focus on).
|
| Didn't want to editorialise the iFixit link with 9to5mac's
| title but we ended up there anyway :)
| dang wrote:
| Yes, it's a mixed bag no matter how one slices it. (mixed
| metaphor too, apparently)
| zrm wrote:
| Credit where credit is due. Let this be a trend.
| spicybright wrote:
| Hear hear. It's frankly amazing how this model did a 180 in
| these aspects.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah it's like they took the list of everyone's complaints -
| touchbar, ports, magsafe, battery and fixed them all. Very
| un-Apple-like.
|
| There's only really minor complaints left, like the
| unreplaceable RAM and disks, and lack of touchscreen.
| blhack wrote:
| >lack of touchscreen.
|
| Please god no.
| randomluck040 wrote:
| Touchscreens are my personal nemesis, too. I have
| literally no scenario where I'd like to lift my hand from
| the keyboard or touchpad to put my finger on my screen to
| click something. Maybe it's a thing with other use cases
| though. I think the new Microsoft Studio Laptop does it
| in a reasonable way since you can fold it and use a pen
| and all. Still not for me but with foldable devices I get
| it at least.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| The "unreplaceable RAM" will only get "worse" from your
| perspective. Meanwhile, many people, myself included, are
| very happy to have better efficiency/performance by co-
| locating the all of the silicon.
|
| Once Apple invests in 3D chiplets, it is very likely that
| RAM, CPU, and GPU will be all be the same component. This
| is also likely necessary to eventually get memristors into
| commercial SOCs. I think maybe even the SSD might get
| pushed into the chiplet if they can manage the 3D real-
| estate. Ideally, even colocate the UWB and cellular
| modem[1] onto the single 3D chiplet or maybe have two SOCs
| one for compute+storage and one for wireless.
|
| [1]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/apple-
| sta...
| chrischen wrote:
| The SSD also has to be replaceable (without a full logic board
| swap) or the machine also has a constrained usable lifetime.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| I'm sure this is more to save $$ for Apple, but either way it's a
| win. It's nice to feel like someone is actually listening with
| this new redesign.
| zerof1l wrote:
| I don't get what is the news here and why this is in top. You
| could always replace the battery. It's just that it is not easy.
| Now to replace it, you need to remove a trackpad. Ridiculous. You
| still can't purchase a replacement battery from Apple to replace
| it yourself. The only option is to purchase it from a place like
| iFixit once your warranty is out, or pay ridiculous price at
| Apple.
| m463 wrote:
| I guess "pull tabs" makes it slightly different...
| bigbaguette wrote:
| Well, the last battery I bought from iFixit was flawed and
| killed the logic board. Victim among a few others of a bad
| batch. They refunded the battery at least.
|
| Now I can fry my logic board again without having to go through
| the major pain of removing the original battery.
| teilo wrote:
| This is incorrect. We are an Apple self-service shop (meaning
| we are authorized by Apple to do our own repairs, order OEM
| parts, etc.). In the 2019 models, battery replacement required
| a new top shell.
| drcongo wrote:
| I'm impressed that you dignified that post with an answer.
| Wingman4l7 wrote:
| No it doesn't, you're (understandably) just not willing to do
| the large amount of labor required to rip out the battery:
|
| https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Touch+Bar+2.
| ..
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| The 2013 and 2015 MacBook pros have a battery and charge
| controller that is so badly glued onto the body that you're
| bound to damage something else in the process of trying to
| replace it.
| eli wrote:
| FTA: _" this new MacBook Pro has, at the very least, the first
| reasonably DIY-friendly battery replacement procedure since
| 2012."_
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I'm not sure what is supposed to be an improvement? I
| replaced a MBP 2015 battery myself, and this did not require
| removing the touchpad.
| thenayr wrote:
| How long did it take you? What level of expertise do you
| have in terms of disassembly / electronics in general? Did
| you read this quote from the article:
|
| "Even better, it appears the battery isn't trapped under
| the logic board. That could mean battery swaps without
| removing all the brains first--a procedure we've been
| dreaming about for a while."
|
| That...seems like a pretty big improvement?
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| It would be an improvement if swapping batteries on a
| 2015 MBP required removing the logic board, which it
| doesn't.
|
| As to expertise: you just need to remove a few screws and
| then the power connector, its not difficult just tedious.
| riffic wrote:
| all the steps are designed to prevent you from damaging
| your speakers with adhesive removal solvent.
|
| You don't have to follow each step, but if you don't know
| any better you should.
|
| taking shortcuts just leads to sloppy outcomes, like any
| repair method.
| masklinn wrote:
| I was going to say that they may have been talking about
| the 2016 revision (g4 / touchbar) with that quote and
| maybe the retinas (g3) were not that bad.
|
| But I went to check the battery replacement guide for the
| 2015 and...: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-
| Inch+Retina+Disp...
|
| > Steps 74
|
| > Time Required 2 - 3 hours
|
| _However_ according to the comments the ifixit people
| were playing it _very safe_ , most of the steps in the
| first half are not entirely necessary and the procedure
| can be completed in about an hour.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| The guide is bullshit and what one would write if one
| wanted to minimize liability. A fishing line (or plastic
| spudger) will save those 2h.
| paxys wrote:
| Sucks that this is now the gold standard whereas for laptops
| sold a decade ago you didn't even need to open up the chassis
| or use a screwdriver to replace the battery.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Laptops a decade ago were modular and thick enough to have
| a frame to support the structure.
|
| The removable battery in your device wasn't supporting the
| device. It's a design trade off that most OEMs have made.
|
| It's an argument akin to complaining about unibody cars.
| For the vast majority of people, like 95%, nobody was
| replacing laptop batteries on a regular basis.
| riffic wrote:
| My experience with expanded lithium batteries says
| otherwise.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| My team maintained about 30k laptops at one point.
|
| We historically bought <1000 batteries a year, mostly due
| to environmental issues like cold and good lifecycle
| management.
| riffic wrote:
| I must either have extremely bad luck or I'm doing
| something wrong with my computers that's triggering
| battery swelling.
|
| having > 3% of your batteries go puffy though is still
| significant when you can redesign your machines to be
| easier to repair.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| My month old Framework belies this.
| c1sc0 wrote:
| I had a black PowerBook in the early 2000s where I could
| swap out the battery while the system was running, if I was
| fast enough ... sub-5sec swap
| masklinn wrote:
| You did for the MBPs, the last of their laptop I remember
| needing no tools to swap the battery is the plastic
| macbooks.
| vinay427 wrote:
| Aluminum MBPs that had batteries that were swappable
| without opening the case existed as well, in the first
| few MBP generations around 2006 or so.
| asdff wrote:
| early unibody macbooks had a door built into the bottom.
| You had access to the battery and HD with no tools. Apple
| said they anticipated users would upgrade to SSDs in a
| few short years during that release keynote so they
| wanted to make it easy for their users (imagine apple
| saying something like that now!! the heavens would open
| up!!!) By the time the late 2012 unibody models were
| released, the door was removed and you had to remove the
| whole bottom case, but this wasn't so bad as it was only
| like 8 phillips head screws (merciful in a world of tri
| tip sandwiches and screwdrivers)
| masklinn wrote:
| Unless you're talking 2009 only then no "early unibody"
| did no have a door, I have a 2010 on my desk.
|
| Pre-unibody I can believe. I had a whitebook and the
| battery popped off and revealed the disk bay and RAM.
| TMWNN wrote:
| As asdff said, you're wrong. The first metal unibody
| MacBook Pro (15") and MacBook (13") in 2008 had batteries
| behind doors. In 2009 the MacBook was replaced with a)
| the unibody plastic MacBook and b) 13" unibody metal
| MacBook Pro, while that year's 15" MacBook Pro was almost
| unchanged, but all three 2009 models lost their doors.
| asdff wrote:
| https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Unibody+Model+A1278+
| Bat...
| ryanhuff wrote:
| I have a 2012 MBP, and Apple won't replace the battery. The
| laptop works great, but Apple considers "obsolete". Sad.
| TMWNN wrote:
| The unibody (non-Retina)'s battery is very, very easy to
| swap. The Retina's is more difficult, but I do not have
| personal experience.
| asdff wrote:
| I have this computer too and I recommend the replacement
| sold on BH photo video. I just put it in and I can somehow
| get like 7 hours plus of use from this computer doing very
| light stuff (like reading hn). Impressive for a computer so
| old. Still very performant for me imo with 16gb of ram and
| an SSD upgrade under the hood. I was looking at the m1 but
| I'll hold off, nothing pushing me away from this device
| currently and it seems like I will have software
| compatibility issues on ARM until they refine rosetta or
| offer bootcamp again.
| ryanhuff wrote:
| Do you have the Retina model? How long did the swap take
| you?
| asdff wrote:
| I have the nonretina. The swap took me probably 5 minutes
| if that. However long it takes to unscrew 10 screws.
| desiarnezjr wrote:
| Replaced the Retina 2012 15" MBP battery fairly recently,
| as well as the SSD a long while ago (with an adapter) and
| took maybe 8 minutes, minus the screws, each time. The
| worry is the 3rd party batteries won't last long or will
| swell sooner than OEM parts.
| masklinn wrote:
| If you have a 2012 you can easily replace the battery
| yourself, just check the relevant ifixit guide for the
| screw bits you need, IIRC from my 2010's replacement the
| battery has a pair of screws (one of which I think is
| behind the HDD bracket, though I may be misremembering) and
| an adhesive strip on the back which can easily be
| overpowered (though it's probably a better idea to soften
| it using heat from the trackpad side).
|
| According to coconut I replaced my battery back in
| 2017~2018 or so (battery was manufactured in October 2017)
| and it was a breeze. "New" battery is at 6934/7000mAh (99%
| capacitity).
| ryanhuff wrote:
| According to ifixit, just 106 easy steps to replace and
| re-assemble! :)
| dont__panic wrote:
| In a world where Apple is pushing on-device CSAM scanning and
| serial number locking cameras to motherboards, it's nice to see
| that some of their products still respect users' rights.
|
| Now if only we could get an iPhone Pro with this kind of respect
| for right to repair.
| sneak wrote:
| You can't wipe the drives on these machines fully and make them
| functional again without an internet connection back to Apple.
|
| Even the Monterey installer doesn't work offline at present,
| even the full 12GB one, or even a usb one made with
| createinstallmedia --downloadassets.
|
| You must transmit your serial number to the mothership.
| asdff wrote:
| Replaceable battery, after removing the trackpad to access the
| final set of cells. Not the easiest projecdure and still is going
| to result in users doing what they do today, handing the machine
| off to a technician rather than be able to change the batteries
| on their device themselves. What a fall from grace from the first
| unibody macbook, where you could remove the battery with no tools
| and five seconds of your time since they engineered a door with a
| latch. I guess we celebrate what small affordances we can get
| these days.
| [deleted]
| scohesc wrote:
| So they say it can actually be replaced.
|
| Nice!
|
| Hopefully they don't pull an iPhone and individually serialize
| batteries that authenticate with other chips on the phone - if
| they don't match you get an annoying warning and supposedly
| underclocked CPU causing performance issues even if it's a brand
| new battery.
| kfprt wrote:
| With the iPhoneification of their product line I'm sure that's
| exactly what's going to happen.
| londons_explore wrote:
| What is the component between the CPU and the fan on each side?
|
| It appears to be non-rectangular silicon... Or perhaps some power
| MOSFETs under a cover?
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| 2022 iphone will have a 3.5mm jack. Mark my words ;)
| acomjean wrote:
| I'm not positive, but by removing the headphone jack, they sell
| more AirPods and force bluetooth on which enables the airtag
| and find my network to be more way more functional.
| tryauuum wrote:
| words marked
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Do people still use wired headphones on the go? It's been a
| while since I've seen any. You can get decent Bluetooth
| wireless headphones for ~$20 now. I remember spending $10 every
| few months when I was using wired headphones back in the day.
| Every few months because the wired inevitably broke or frayed
| (don't forget you have to put them somewhere when you're not
| using them). It was hell with jackets and layers in the winter.
|
| I always got the orange version of this:
| https://refreshcartridges.co.uk/productimages/a_121995.jpg
|
| In any case where I care enough to listen wired, I also care
| enough to get a separate DAC. The cheap Bluetooth is
| competitive with the cheap wired these days and last longer.
|
| Example: https://www.amazon.com/TOZO-T6-Bluetooth-Headphones-
| Waterpro...
|
| Id rather use that space for extra battery capacity.
| asdff wrote:
| I do, I use some sony MDRV6 cans when travelling or doing
| work. They are 10 years old and will last another 40 at least
| producing this reference tier sound. I think I payed $70 for
| these. I have no interest in airpods or crap like that, I
| already have their wired ones which I use exclusively for
| video conferencing and I know what sort of sound comes out of
| those.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| I use wired headphones. I don't like charging my headphones.
| I'm not big into mobile phones or other devices though, so
| IDK, I'm probably an atypical user. I'm actually annoyed that
| phones no longer have headphone ports on them.
| arprocter wrote:
| Yes - no need to charge them, less likely to get lost, no
| figuring out if my device speaks random codec v1 or 2
|
| MMCX connectors mean you can replace the cable, not that I've
| ever broken a Shure one (they use Kevlar)
| paconbork wrote:
| >Do people still use wired headphones on the go?
|
| I do, at least. The main reason is that they just work. I
| never have to worry about pairing with different devices,
| walking too far away and disconnecting, keeping them
| charged... I have a pair of bluetooth headphones but I'm
| pretty sure they're not charged.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I only use wired headphones when the wireless alternative
| uses AAC.
| [deleted]
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| I only use wired headphones. Bluetooth = PITA. Wired earbuds
| are like $1 for crappy ones, which are good enough for my
| purposes. I also have a bigger set of over-the-ear headphones
| from back before wireless was a thing, and those work fine in
| all my stuff too. Bluetooth is sort of like USB, a basically
| sane and simple idea that got committee-enhanced to the point
| of permanent brokenness.
| gsich wrote:
| Yes they do.
| humanistbot wrote:
| I hate having to remember to recharge yet another device. My
| wired earbuds never run out of battery.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Are they pads for extra DRAM on the bottom left of the PCB?
|
| Will we see hobbysts with a heat gun adding ram to these things?
| BGA soldering with tweezers and a heat gun doesn't look too
| tricky on those because the pad spacing is easily within what you
| could manage with tweezers.
|
| The actual pin layout isn't a standard I recognize - so I assume
| apple has ordered custom made ram chips ..
| rwaksmunski wrote:
| For me the 2021 MacBook Pro is a single USB-A port away from
| perfect. I want to use my old but good
| printer/scanner/mouse/thumb drive/external hard drive/yubikey
| without dongles.
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| A lot of dongle talk seems weird to me. A to C adapters are
| cheap. Buy a bunch and leave them on the things you regularly
| use. No dongle to track.
| tantalor wrote:
| > we notice ... battery pull tabs
|
| Is the picture supposed to show these new tabs? I don't see
| anything. Can I get a red arrow?
| fakename wrote:
| It's the thing being stretched between the fingers. Like a
| command strip.
| riffic wrote:
| Is this Apple?
|
| Well, maybe I'll consider one of these over a Framework. I'll
| lean strongly towards the Framework machine but at least Apple is
| reconsidering some of their design choices over the last decade.
| tantony wrote:
| I recently bought a Framework as a replacement for my 2012 MBP.
| I ordered it a few weeks before the new M1 announcements
| because I liked their philosophy. And the hardware is, in fact,
| great!
|
| But the Linux desktop experience has been ... frustrating to
| say the least. And I say this as someone who has used linux in
| the terminal at my job every day for 5+ years now. It's
| ridiculous that the software experience still cannot match my 9
| year old laptop running macOS Sierra on a 2.5GHz Core i5 and
| 8GB of DDR3 RAM!
|
| I am running PopOS 21.04. There's inconsistent keyboard
| shortcuts, lack of touchpad precision, glitchy touchpad
| gestures, inconsistent fingerprint auth and more. Just on Day
| 2, I somehow ended up with a machine that somehow took 30+
| seconds to go from login to desktop and 3-4 second lag when
| typing with 100% CPU usage when running any GUI app. The only
| way to fix it was to completely reinstall the OS -- I have no
| idea what caused this. I have now found some usable options for
| implementing my preferred touchpad gestures ("fusuma") and
| system-wide keyboard shortcuts ("kinto.sh") though there are
| still many quirks that are irritating.
|
| I like Framework's approach, so I supported them by buying the
| device. I promised myself I will keep daily driving it for at
| least a month to give it a chance. If it keeps getting on my
| nerves, I will sell it and buy one the of the new 14" MBPs.
| Life's too short to spend hours upon hours fiddling with
| configuration files and reinstalling operating systems to get
| basic functionality working.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Personally I find Gnome environments pretty ugly. I switched
| to KDE on my Framework and it's almost night and day that I'm
| leaving my desktop Gnome install behind for KDE as well.
| speedyapoc wrote:
| Very nice to see!
|
| I use my machine in closed clamshell around 90% of the time which
| means the battery is usually in pretty terrible shape after a
| couple years of use. Will be happy to see battery replacement
| times hopefully go down on these new machines as waiting 5-7 days
| isn't fun to deal with.
| asdff wrote:
| I really don't understand why macbooks are set up to still draw
| off the battery when under AC power. You can only get a mac to
| run off ac power only if you start it up with the battery
| physically removed iirc. I had a macbook where I was spinning
| fans for most of the day and I got it down to 85% battery
| capacity within a year since it keeps straining the battery
| even when its just sitting on my desk running off a 90W power
| adapter at 100% charge. Its like, whats the point of paying for
| these workhorse laptops if you are going to be blowing through
| batteries once you actually start to utilize the power you are
| paying egregiously for? Might as well get a powerful mac mini
| and connect to it with ssh from a much cheaper laptop.
| hbn wrote:
| > I had a macbook where I was spinning fans for most of the
| day and I got it down to 85% battery capacity within a year
| since it keeps straining the battery even when its just
| sitting on my desk running off a 90W power adapter at 100%
| charge
|
| They released a feature in Big Sur where it learns if you
| always keep your laptop plugged in, and during those times
| (which may be all the time, like in my case) it'll hover the
| battery between 70-80% to preserve battery health, and won't
| charge up to 100% until you tell it to manually (click the
| battery icon -> "Charge to full now")
| TMWNN wrote:
| >I use my machine in closed clamshell around 90% of the time
| which means the battery is usually in pretty terrible shape
| after a couple years of use.
|
| For those of us who usually use our MacBooks attached to the
| wall, deep discharging (AKA "calibration";
| )
| on a regular basis is a substitute, but is annoying to do.
|
| I similarly went through batteries every couple of years. I now
| use FruitJuice (on the App Store) as the menu bar battery
| indicator. If it finds that the computer hasn't been used on
| battery long enough, about once a month the app guides me
| through running a maintenance cycle to run it down to 20%. I
| presume that following FruitJuice's advice is why my latest
| third-party battery is still at 103% health after more than a
| year.
| riffic wrote:
| > FruitJuice
|
| Thanks for the tip, I'll have to give this a shot.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Important question: Are the batteries serialized or will any 3rd
| party battery just work?
| exoque wrote:
| That's not at all what I think of when I hear the words
| 'replaceable battery'. Too bad.
| ct0 wrote:
| About as replaceable as a tesla's battery. You simply cant do
| it yourself. Seems like a trend.
| Ductapemaster wrote:
| This is dismissive and incorrect. iFixIt, the authors of this
| piece, provide everything someone needs to do such a
| replacement: tools, parts, and in-depth user guides. I've
| replaced an older-generation MacBook's battery using their
| stuff, and it worked fine. What more do you want?
| asdff wrote:
| The vast majority of people are not comfortable opening
| their computer and mucking around the guts. In the old days
| Apple made this simple for their users:
|
| https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Unibody+Model+A1278+Ba
| t...
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I had a 2007 MacBook Pro. Replacing the battery for that
| laptop meant toggling two switches and popping it out, then
| dropping a new one in.
|
| It's not unreasonable for people to ask for that level of
| simplicity.
| GordonS wrote:
| It's similar for most older laptops too. I have a few
| older HP laptops, and on every one the battery just
| slides out if you pull it hard enough - no screws at all.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Yeah there's still a long way to go to get back to where we
| used to be.
| sbuk wrote:
| What is the use case? Modern batteries hold their charge for
| a long time. In a review I saw today, the reviewer - a
| professional photographer and filmmaker no less - said that
| he managed to shoot edit and export a video on a single
| charge[0]. The need to swap out batteries with these device
| has all but disappeared, save for permanent replacement.
|
| [0]https://youtu.be/I10WMJV96ns?t=643
| lamontcg wrote:
| The use case is the ability to easily replace/upgrade the
| batteries, RAM and drives by the end consumer without
| requiring any specialized tools or procedures barring
| removing some screws.
|
| This is what we used to have with laptops 10+ years ago.
|
| Swapping batteries due to charge issues was never
| particularly important to the majority of consumers and is
| a red herring.
| sbuk wrote:
| The benefits provided by SoCs outweigh the benefits of
| user upgradeable RAM for me.
|
| > Swapping batteries due to charge issues was never
| particularly important to the majority of consumers and
| is a red herring.
|
| Why?
| rasz wrote:
| You say that like those are somehow mutually exclusive.
| sbuk wrote:
| They kind of are by definition - System on a Chip. I'll
| rephrase; the benefits of having on-package RAM (unified
| would be even better!) outweigh the benefits of user-
| upgradable RAM. User upgradable/appendable storage is
| another thing entirely.
| rasz wrote:
| The _only_ real benefits of on-package RAM are cost and
| forcing planned obsolescence. You get maybe 0.2ns latency
| difference by not laying out ram socket next to CPU.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >The benefits provided by SoCs outweigh the benefits of
| user upgradeable RAM for me.
|
| And 90% of laptop users. Utility of computer upgrades for
| most people's needs stagnated 5 to even 10 years ago. I
| think the last big material improvement before M1 for
| regular consumers was SSD replacing HDD.
| Nition wrote:
| Just noting an alternative use case: When I used to take my
| laptop (a Dell XPS M1530, later a Dell Studio XPS 13) on my
| walk between home and university, I'd take it without the
| battery in as that made it much lighter. There were power
| points where I was going anyway.
| Kluny wrote:
| I don't get it - the battery isn't glued in, and you can remove
| it without damaging other parts. Isn't that pretty good?
| atoav wrote:
| I can flip my notebook over, pop the battery out and put a
| new one in within 5 seconds. That is replacable.
|
| I also replaced a macbook battery once, with a hot air
| resoldering station (to soften the adhesive) and a metal
| bucket filled with sand nearby in case it catches fire (the
| battery was balooning and bending the aluminium frame out of
| shape). The whole thing took nearly an hour. Ultimately it
| was also replaceable, but this was needlessly painful.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| When I hear "replaceable battery", it makes me think of the
| days when packing a spare battery was a viable alternative to
| bringing a laptop charger with you (I don't think any MBPs
| were like this, but Powerbooks were). It's funny how the
| Overton window has shifted.
|
| This procedure looks doable and relatively low risk for
| technical people, but it's not something that my mom can do
| while sitting at a Starbucks
| klelatti wrote:
| The first gen MBP (which was basically a PowerBook with
| Intel) had this. I remember pondering whether to buy one.
| robocat wrote:
| Your spare battery is now a power bank:
| https://www.powerbankexpert.com/best-power-bank-for-
| macbook-...
|
| Sure, a bit less power efficient, but surely cheaper than
| an Apple product, and you can choose your features e.g. AC
| inverter!
| asdff wrote:
| It's still an entire procedure. You have to remove the
| trackpad to access all the cells. Most users aren't going to
| be confident doing that to their $2000 laptop, they will
| continue doing what they do with glued in batteries today
| which is hand it off to a technician and playing the flat
| rate apple repair fee.
|
| Pretty good was the first unibody macbook (open latch with
| one finger, remove door with two fingers, remove battery with
| two fingers, done):
|
| https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Unibody+Model+A1278+Bat.
| ..
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