281–290 of 562 posts
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Unfortunately the back lid is not thick enough for that - even the iPhone isn't thick enough for the iPhone camera system, hence the "bump". I actually wouldn't mind something closer to the iPad + magic keyboard design in a pro macbook, which would have the thickness needed for a significantly better camera.
Why not have a bump in the MacBook screen with a small penalty in trackpad size?
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The current trend in user interfaces is not to design for desktop but for mobile first, because that's where the large majority of users are. Of course you have exceptions, when a company develops an application only for desktop for example or when a company can afford developing and maintaining many versions of one user interface. Already today it's very fine to use a laptop with a touchscreen on most websites. And…
You aren't making much sense. If someone is making a desktop app , how could it possibly be mobile first ? Even if you're using the cancer that is Electron, that design with a lot of whitespace is always deliberate. I'm not saying that it's not fine to use a touchscreen laptop for something. I'm saying that no one uses them like that with any kind of seriousness because it's awkward and physically inconvenient to pok…
Yes a touchscreen can be inconvenient in some positions. That's why you have devices such as the Surface pro or the foldable laptops you mention.
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Doesn't Apple generally make worse cables than the competition? It is very rare for a PC laptop power cable to break. There's a rubber grommet which protects the cable as it enters the plug from extreme and repeated bending. For supposed aesthetics, Apple don't include this, and their cables fray easily. (This is based on my experience managing hardware for a small organization, Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc business laptops co…
Very rare? Come on. I still have that Dell somewhere which had cable frayed right where its stress relief mold ended.
I have a stack of old laptops 2 feet high, and my old Dell that frayed at the strain relief is the only one whose cable crapped out.
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I have a MacBook Air 2012 with an SD card reader. It has a 256GB SSD drive, and a 1 TB SD Card inside that I use for storing photos, video, music, etc. essentially everything that does not need fast storage. This laptop was only meant to be a 1 year temporary solution, so I’ve been waiting 9 years to upgrade. I’ve yet to find a new reasonably priced MacBook with 1,256Gb of built in storage. Carrying an external drive…
This is sort of unreasonable too hot too cold type thinking. If you need a certain price point for a certain feature, why not expand to not limiting your search to only one manufacturer, which seems to be your binding constraint here since you’ve delayed updating 7 years, instead of expecting a manufacturer that has less than 10% of the total market share of an industry to meet you needs?
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Give a MacBook to a child and she will likely try to touch the screen. Because at this point a touch interface is expected by people. Even me who is used to non touch screens user interfaces, I tend to touch the screen on a non touchscreen laptop once in a while. It's frustrating that it doesn't work, because it does work on my ThinkPad and I enjoy it. Apple not having a touchscreen option on their high end laptops i…
In general, where there is a touchscreen, there is a dumbed-down UI with significantly reduced functionality. Touchscreen devices are great for content consumption and communication. But not so much for creating anything. General purpose computers, with precision input devices, are still required by many for getting serious work (and play) done.
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I mean... no? If there’s a trade off involved then the “best” solution is the one that works for me at the cost of inconveniencing others :) I don’t think you’ll convince people to think otherwise.
> If there’s a trade off involved then the “best” solution is the one that works for me at the cost of inconveniencing others :) But Apple aren't just trying to please you - they're trying to please most people. Most people don't use SD cards or USB-A devices anymore. The few who do can still do it using dongles, but the majority get a better laptop without them.
On one hand, this seems like welcome news for many of us. Who doesn't miss MagSafe? A lot of the previous years was like someone at Apple read Calvino's Six Memos and took the notes on "lightness" a little bit too far. On the other hand, one wonders if we'll have to replace all the sleeves and bags that have been made with the previous dimensions in mind. Hopefully not. Even the new 16-inch MacBook Pro fits in sleeve…
Not only does the 16” fit the 15” sleeves, it’s nearly identical in dimensions and weight to the 15” models everyone praises before the bad keyboards. It’s basically a 2015 MBP with a slightly smaller bezel.
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That's interesting. I also use SD cards to transfer data from my phone (I make tons of photos). I used to do it by connecting via USB cable, but after a couple of months the USB-C port worn out and no longer works, so for me the only reasonable way to get the data out is through an SD card. I tried things like setting up network server and sending files wirelessly but that was flaky.
You're an outlier. Most people don't take and process as many photos as you, and if they do, the processing is Instagram filters :-) Also the need to transfer photos around has decreased drastically with social media sharing and cloud storage. You'll see in the next few years that smartphones, tablets, laptops will cater less and less to your needs. Sad... But probably inevitable.
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> I’m also all in on USB-c (even my shaver uses it for charging) It's funny how different people's experiences can be. Maybe it's because I'm not in the Apple ecosystem and tend to use my devices until they break, but I own a single device that uses usb-c: a raspberry pi 4b. There are two other usb-c ports in my house, one on my laptop and one on my desktop, but I've never used them. I don't even own a separate usb-c…
> because I'm going to have to replace everything You mean, you'll have to replace the cables. Not the devices themselves, unless you want to be able to use USB-C-to-C cables everywhere.
Right now, all of the "source" devices (for lack of a better word) have USB-A "out" — laptop, desktop, charging bricks — and all the peripherals — phone, tablet, bluetooth speaker, xbox controller… — have USB-Micro "in". Thus, the only type of usb cable that I need is A->Micro.
If/when I replace my phone, I have my first USB-C peripheral, but the others haven't disappeared, so now I need both my old A->Micro cables and A->C for my phone. Same for my laptop, on the source end — now I need C->C and C->Micro, too. It gets worse: it's rare that I want to charge/connect all my peripherals at once, but it's common that I'll want to charge any two. Plus, you always want a spare.
So now instead of ~3 cables, I'm going to end up with probably 7 or 8, and when I go to grab one out of the drawer I'll need to check both ends of the cable to know I'm getting the right one… ugh. The only way to keep the combinations under control is to replace all source devices or all peripherals at once (or take the middle ground and buy a bunch of C->Micro dongles, pair one with each peripheral, and now they're faux-C peripherals). None of these options are particularly appealing to me.
I'm being a little melodramatic. It's not really that big of a deal. I'll live through it and eventually I'll make it out the other end and maybe I'll be in a C->C golden era. I'm just not looking forward to the transition when USB cable story right now is pretty simple (even if I dislike Micro; Mini was a far nicer connector).
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> I'm saying that no one uses them like that with any kind of seriousness because it's awkward and physically inconvenient to poke your fingers into a vertical surface in front of you for any extended period of time. I think users of Windows laptops have embraced touchscreens in spite of these downsides, because a touchscreen is still less bad than the touchpads on those laptops. But Apple doesn't have the problem of…
I have no problem with the touchpad on my XPS, but I find the touchscreen quite useful. * Have to log kid into Teams classroom in the morning: pick up laptop, tap calendar, tap meeting, tap join, done. Much quicker than dragging a pointer around everywhere. * Cooking dinner, greasy fingertips, want to skip songs: tap Skip with my knuckle. * Looking at pictures, maps, reading a website, etc with family or looking thro…
And on top of the touchscreen offering almost no advantages over a truly good touchpad, Apple's touchpads have haptic feedback that isn't really possible with a laptop-sized touchscreen. They also support a wider array of multi-touch gestures than most touchscreen software can recognize, and that's before getting into third-party software that adds more gestures, such that touchpad gestures can replace about half of the keyboard shortcuts I use.