391–400 of 872 posts
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> I like the new keyboard I can get with the rest but stating that is absolute insanity to me. It has something like a 10-20% failure rate on a medium timeline.
Well, mileage may vary and all that but my keyboard has a 0% failure rate so far. Knocks on wood.
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If you remember the original iMac, they did the same thing with USB-A. Everybody was concerned that the iMac's only I/O port was USB (when others had serial, parallel, and maybe SCSI/USB as an afterthought), and it was completely incompatible with legacy peripherals. For many years USB accessories were considered specialty items for the Mac market. It kinda sucked at first... but it's not clear if USB would have even…
> but it's not clear if USB would have even caught on if Apple didn't do that. Here's the problem with that argument; Macs are a pretty small percentage of the computer market, and always have been. Consumer peripheral companies are driven by what people will buy, not moving the market forward. USB was always going to be what it is, and if you want evidence of Apple's lack of power here just look at FireWire. They pu…
Macs are definitely a small portion of the computer market, but it’s a big enough market for companies to target. You’ll find Mac-specific keyboards from big-name companies like Logitech, for example. With the iMac, USB went from “weird connector nobody uses” to “we have a guaranteed pool of millions of customers with no alternative.” And because of the U in USB, those products worked with PCs too, if they had USB ports and drivers to make them work. It kicked off a virtuous cycle where more peripherals meant more computer supporting them meant more peripherals.
FireWire wasn’t the same scenario since there was no pressing need to support it. USB was good enough for 99% of what people needed. Unless you needed high speed storage or high end audio, you didn’t need it, and USB versions were cheaper anyway. FireWire was never pushed so hard that it was the only thing available on many popular computers.
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It’d be interesting to see the results of a survey on this I think, I and I know many of my peers are of the exact opposite opinion. I like the move to usb-c, I like the new keyboard, I don’t mind (but also don’t really use) the Touch Bar but I can’t live without Touch ID at this point. The big trackpad is magical to me, and the thickness and weight of the 13” is just right. I have an older MBP as well, 2013 maybe, a…
The top comment on this thread is asking for the ports back. The majority has spoken. My workstations have become a dumpster fire of dongles and I constantly have to unplug something to use the ports for something else. The previous model was so much better.
Point being: whether a design is good or not is mostly subjective, and great design is often polarizing. A more scientific survey would be interesting, but it's still fun to see all the diverse responses here.
Given his penchant for thinness over function, I hope this means we can have a thicker pro laptop again, with all the ports back and a more robust keyboard.
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YMMV I guess, but I work as a programmer at a company where all the programmers carry these around and spend their whole days in emacs or tmux+vim. There are about a hundred of us in our local office. I haven’t found anyone who doesn’t hate this thing, and it all comes down to that stupid butterfly keyboard. We’re a company of super-efficient touch typists, and the 2015 MacBook pros with their scissor switches are co…
Do you really have a lot of programmers typing on a laptop keyboard for much of the day? That would seem really strange to me. No laptop keyboard is good compared to a good mechanical, or really any external keyboard. I have one of these pros and I type on it a fair bit because I commute on the bus and I agree its not the best...but at the office I have proper equipment for doing programming work.
I haven’t forgiven this guy for the latest “thin at any cost” 4th gen MacBook Pro we’ve had since 2016. He ruined the best programer’s laptop on the market. Maybe with him and his ego gone, they can fix the next generation and salvage the product line.
> He ruined the best programer’s laptop on the market. Do people really think the macbook as a device is great for programming? Maybe it's just personal preference but I've always hated the keyboard (spacing was bad and lots of more less mainstream keys that are important in programming like the function keys were really small) and how annoyingly large the mouse pad is.
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This decision was promptly copied by every other major phone manufacturer, for the same reasons Apple made the decision. The 3.5mm jack is obsolete and getting rid of it enables a better, tougher device which is more waterproof.
Its not obselete when 100s of millions of people use it everyday and the replacement is expensive, needs replacing because the batteries die and has poorer sound quality. No phone is more waterproof with it than without (they all have complex data ports with many connection vs three or four in a jack). No phone has a bigger battery. No phone is tougher. It allows Apple and others to sell expensice Bluetooth ear buds.…
In that type of structure, preventing wrong decisions comes down to things like the personality traits, wisdom, etc. of the people with all the power. In other words, is he or she the type of person that can be convinced NOT to do something that they would otherwise decide to do?
I can only observe what has come out of Apple in recent years. I immediately saw things I disliked in their software when Jony Ive was also put in charge of software (to this day, much of iOS-7-style apps seem form-over-function to me and I want more gradients, damn-it). And there were also some massive hardware failures, most of all keyboards, screens and Touch Bars. If Jony made most of these calls and just couldn’t be convinced otherwise, I’m glad he’s gone and look forward to a happy medium of “pretty nice but usable” hardware and software.
For instance, take the Macbook Pro. There's two ways of viewing it. The first view is that it sucks. There's no USB A ports to plug in flash drives. There's no SD card reader. The lack of function keys is inexcusable, terrible, whatever. The second view is that it's incredible. The laptop is thin and absolutely beautiful. You can palm it in one hand with ease. When you hold it, you feel its lightness and lithe.
The main difference between these points of view is that the first perspective has prerequisites. The people who hold this view are those who use flash drives, or those who need SD card readers, or those who use function keys. Take note, this is far from the general population. I know I don't need a lot of these features on a daily basis and I'm not unusual. On the other hand, the second point of view is one of aesthetics. And as much as some may claim the contrary, we all value aesthetics to a degree. Even if some may vocalize to the contrary, deep down everybody likes pretty, shiny stuff.
And man, Apple (and therefore Ive) makes pretty, shiny stuff like no other. What I respect about Ive is just how relentless he is in his pursuit of beauty. Beauty in aesthetics, but also beauty in sensation. What stuns me is how no other computer company has figured this out. I have a ThinkPad on my desktop and it's just so goddamn ugly. It's made of this cheap plastic that feels light, yet the laptop is heavier than my Macbook Pro. The lid is too heavy, so you have to hold the bottom portion down to open the laptop. There are two unnecessary logos that are too small to be easily read from afar and too ugly to be worthwhile. The laptop just feels bad. Granted, a ThinkPad is a bit of a strawman. Microsoft's own products are probably a better comparison. To an extent, they're quite nice, pretty beautiful even. Yet they still don't have this relentlessness towards beauty that Apple has. Their products still feel like compromises. And in compromising the products have become more attractive to group A or population B. But they have lost their raw magnetism, the beauty that attracts all. Whether or not this alienation of the small groups is worth the attraction of the larger population is a separate debate, but I respect Apple and Ive's decision to stay on one side.
Speaking of, it's rather fascinating seeing how Apple can make a product feel "new" for so many different iterations. I've thought that a particular iteration was the pinnacle of this product, that nothing else would look cooler or newer or more...well futuristic. Only to be totally proven wrong by the next iteration.